Site of Fanta Castle, Fanta Glebe, Co. Clare
Site of Fanta Castle, Fanta Glebe, Co. Clare
Clare. The site appears on early Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 onwards, though today no visible traces of the tower house survive above ground. What was once an O’Connor stronghold had passed to the O’Briens by 1574, before Cromwellian forces granted it to Arthur Hyde and Patrick Stafford in 1641.
When the Ordnance Survey Letters were compiled in the 1920s, small portions of the castle walls were still standing, with a dwelling house built within them. Those remnants have since vanished, but fragments of the medieval structure live on in unexpected places. Roughly dressed hammerstones and quoinstones from the original tower house have been incorporated into the walls of a modern cottage built about 5 metres east-northeast of where the castle once stood.
In 1997, researchers Risteárd Ua Cróinín and Martin Breen documented several architectural fragments built into these cottage walls, including pieces of window loops, an inverted ogee-headed lintel, and a large door jamb complete with its bolt hole. Though most of these features had disappeared or been covered by July 1998, a medieval windowsill can still be spotted in the wall of an outhouse southwest of the cottage; a tangible link to the fortress that once commanded this small hill above the streams.