Oratory, Farnaght, Co. Leitrim
Hidden within a small circular rath just outside a graveyard in Farnaght, County Leitrim, stand the ruins of what was once mistaken for a church.
Oratory, Farnaght, Co. Leitrim
This tower house, measuring approximately 9 metres north to south and 6 metres east to west, appears on the 1655-6 Down Survey barony map of Mohill as a ‘stone house’ complete with chimney, then owned by Bryan Reynolds, a substantial landowner who controlled over 700 acres across nine townlands in Cloone parish.
The structure’s true nature was obscured for centuries; local accounts from the 1940s tell how the ruins lay buried beneath a mound of clay until Lord Leitrim excavated them around the mid-nineteenth century. Even the Ordnance Survey mapmakers of 1907 misidentified the building, marking it as an ‘Oratory’ rather than recognising it as a defensive tower house. The confusion is perhaps understandable given its location near a graveyard and the religious associations such proximity might suggest.
Today, visitors can still trace the tower’s defensive features, particularly in the southern wall which rises to about 2 metres and displays a pronounced base-batter, a sloping foundation designed to deflect projectiles and strengthen the structure. A pointed doorway at the centre of this wall leads into a 2.4-metre passage built into the wall’s thickness, where a spiral staircase once connected the tower’s levels. The doorway to these newel stairs, with its pointed arch standing 1.55 metres high, remains visible on the western side of the passage. Surrounding the castle on all sides is a cairn of stones, most prominent at the south where it reaches over a metre in height, perhaps remnants of the mound that once concealed this forgotten stronghold.