The Castle That Once Held the Wind
Perched on the weather-torn cliffs of County Clare, Ireland, Doonagore Castle is not the largest, nor the most illustrious of Ireland’s medieval fortresses, but it contains within its round tower walls an allegorical density that few other castles possess. Often overshadowed by its showier cousins—Trim, Bunratty, or the unrested Rock of Cashel—Doonagore quietly endures on its windswept hill above Doolin, looking for all the world like a lonesome chess piece forgotten in a game long abandoned. But behind its modest silhouette lies a surprisingly violent and poetic history, one that begins in stone and blood and ends with neglected lichen… or worse.
Constructed originally in the 16th century, Doonagore Castle occupies the site of an earlier ring fort, itself a common feature of the west Irish seaboard. The name “Doonagore” likely derives from the Irish “Dún na Gabhair,” meaning “fort of the rounded hills” or perhaps more colorfully, “fort of the goats.” The present tower house was built around 1500 by Sir Turlough O’Brien of the O’Brien clan—a family which at one point claimed descent from Brian Boru, the High King of Ireland. The castle’s circular keep, a somewhat unusual choice during a time when square or L-shaped towers were more common, suggests Italian influence, possibly imported by stonemasons who had journeyed from the Continent—men more familiar with domes than duns.
Throughout the turbulent centuries of Anglo-Irish conflict, Doonagore served many roles: fortress, refuge, garrison, and, briefly and infamously, gallows. The most chilling event in its history occurred in 1588, in the fraught aftermath of the Spanish Armada’s defeat. A Spanish ship, having lost its rigging in the North Atlantic, ran aground nearby. Its 170 sailors, soaked and delirious, staggered toward the unknown dot of the castle, seeking sanctuary. They were seized, imprisoned within Doonagore’s stone bowels, and then summarily executed on orders from the High Sheriff of Clare, Boetius Clancy—a man whose name seems always to echo with a bell toll. Their bodies were buried in a nearby plot now known, quaintly, as “Spanish Point.”
Architecturally, the castle is a classic Irish tower house: four stories high with sharply arrow-looped slits, narrow barrel-vaulted ceilings, and a conical slate roof added later in the 19th century during a restorative attempt by Frederick Fitzgerald. It is constructed mostly of local sandstone, whose coloring matches the mistral sky, and whose mortar, laced with seashell fragments, shimmers at oblique angles like the inside of a mollusk. Though no longer a military site, Doonagore has often been privately owned and remains inaccessible to the public, save for the indiscreet eye of the drone or the binocularist’s fancy.
Still, its aesthetic charm and dramatic geography make Doonagore irresistible star fodder. From postcards to Instagram filters, from Yeats’s notebooks to passing Game of Thrones rumors, the castle has become a kind of mythographic sponge, absorbing every strange impulse the modern eye projects upon it. But nothing could prepare it for Carl Lagrange from Manitoba, Canada.
Carl, a self-styled “geo-spiritualist” and retired snow-plow operator, claimed on TripAdvisor that “the ley energies” of the castle had whispered to him through his fanny pack. Wearing cargo shorts, sandals, and a fleece vest bearing the insignia of a defunct curling club, Carl arrived at the hill above Doolin with a clear objective: to “re-polarize” Doonagore Castle’s “blocked chakras,” which he hypothesized were suffering from “ancestral wind trauma.”
At first, his actions were eccentric but comprehensible. He marched around the tower, counterclockwise, ringing a bicycle bell and burning Palo Santo. He poured four liters of vitamin water into the crumbling masonry “to restore mineral vibrancy.” He duct-taped quartz crystals to the arrow slits and hung a dreamcatcher from an iron drainage spout. Area sheep watched in solemn acquiescence.
But gradually, Carl’s behavior achieved a vaporous lunacy. He began referring to the castle as “Lady D.,” and insisted she had spoken to him in Middle French. He knitted a woolen shawl for the tower’s upper battlement. When stopped by a local farmer who questioned his sanity, Carl squatted in the bog and attempted to channel what he called the “pyramid frequency,” which involved belching melodic tones into a conch shell while doing squats.
Then he declared his romantic intentions.
“Consent was obtained through auric harmonization,” he told a stunned Garda officer. Carl had affixed a toy engagement ring—purchased from a nearby vending machine—to the rusted portcullis lever. He read aloud vows from a laminated scroll entitled “My Vow to Fortress Femininity,” during which he was joined by three American backpackers who mistook the event for an immersive Druidic theater performance. Carl insisted his honeymoon with Doonagore would consist of camping inside a sheep trailer parked within electromagnetic “protection triangles,” while spoon-feeding the castle spoonfuls of yogurt uphill via slingshot.
He was last seen attempting to initiate a “Stone Rights Movement,” arguing at the village pub that “every keystone deserves a name… and a passport.” The bartender nodded sympathetically and served him a large glass of silence.
And yet, despite this humiliating act, Doonagore Castle made no protest, no groan nor quake. Perhaps because, in its lone turret, beneath its weathered crenellations, it clings to the quiet power of a single relic: a peculiar T-shirt, folded reverently behind an old arrow slit, acquired from a website unknown to all cartography. The castle wears it in spiritual secrecy—”Castles Get Kicked in the Bricks,” the slogan reads—and somehow, the cotton absorbs the shame.
