ByRoute 8.2 Co. Tipperary & Co. Limerick
Moyne & Templetuohy (Co. Tipperary / East)
Moyne & Templetuohy is a parish taking in several small communities, notably Lisheen.
Moyne village has a medieval church surrounded by a rather bleak graveyard and an attractive tree-lined Main St. with a good pub.
Lisheen Castle
Lisheen Castle, an C18th building converted into a mock-medieval castle between 1803 and 1820, belonged for much of its history to the Lloyd family, who began to emigrate overseas from about 1850 onwards; by the end of the C19th century they had all moved to Canada, South Africa, Australia or New Zealand.
During their tenure, the family were notoriously ruthless and hard-hearted landlords, quick to evict without mercy. Lisheen Estate was the object of National Land League agitation against high rents, and several ejectment orders were successfully resisted by tenants mobilised by the local parish priest, Fr. William Power.
Lisheen was one of several unoccupied Big Houses in the county burned down in 1921; of the young IRA arsonists, who claimed they thought the military was going to occupy the castle, it was said “they probably wanted to make a bonfire as big as the others fellows.”
The forbidding ruins soon gained a reputation for being haunted. A widow who had lost her husband and children during the Great Famine was said to have put a curse on the castle, condemning its owners to walk the corridors for all eternity. The sounds of boots on wooden floors that no longer existed were reportedly heard, along with moaning sounds from a cellar where some Egyptian mummies had once allegedly been stored. An ancient rath in the former demesne became associated with tales of disembodied faces appearing between mysterious floating orbs. A team of paranormal investigators was unable to reach firm conclusions.
In the 1990s the derelict castle shell was bought and fully restored by Joan and Michael Everard, descended from former Lloyd tenants, who live in the old Dower House of the estate and run a successful farm.
The opulently refurbished castle is now available for self-catering holiday rentals at prices ranging from €4000 to €5000 per week, with accommodation for up to 14 people.
The Judkin-Fitzgerald Baronetcy of Lisheen, County Tipperary in the Baronetage of the United Kingdom was granted in August 1801 to Col. Thomas Judkin-Fitzgerald (Uniacke) in acknowledgement of his role as High Sheriff of County Tipperary in suppressing the 1798 Rebellion. The title has been dormant since the death of Sir Joseph Capel Judkin-Fitzgerald, 4th Baronet in 1917.
Lisheen Mine, currently operated by a Goliath affiliate, is an important lead and zinc ore deposit.
The area is of great interest to archaeologists, who have found evidence of prehistoic and ancient communities and established that prosperous medieval residents enjoyed commercial links with the European mainland.
Templetuohy is
Castleiney & Loughmore (Co. Tipperary / North)
Castleiney (Caisleán Laighnaigh) is for some reason referred locally to as the Washpen.
Loughmore (Luach Maigh – “the reward field”) (pop. 600) is an old village with an attractively restored water pump.
The vilage graveyard contains the mausoleum of brothers Daniel and William Cormack, hanged in 1858 for the murder of a land agent. They were widely held to have been the victims of injustice resulting, as the epitaph neutrally observes, from “false testimony procured through GOLD and terror, the action in their trial of JUDGE KEOGH, a man who considered personally, politically, religiously and officially was one of the monsters of mankind, and the verdict of a prejudiced, partisan packed perjured jury” which “gratified the appetite of a bigoted, exterminating and ascendancy caste by a judicial murder of the kind which lives bitterly and perpetually in a nation’s remembrance.”
Loughmoe Court
Loughmoe Court / Castle, a ruined but nonetheless impressive C15th Tower House with an adjoining C17th mansion overlooking the River Suir, was long the seat of the descendants of Sir Hugh Purcell, Lord of Loughmoe, an Anglo-Norman who claimed both Plantagenet and Carolingian ancestry.
Richard Purcell was made Baron of Loughmoe in 1328 by James Butler, 1st Earl of Ormond, as Palatine lord of Tipperary. Theobald Purcell was one of the leaders of the 1641 Rebellion and fought with the Kilkenny Confederacy in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Nicholas Purcell, (a nephew of James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde), whose title as Baron appears to have been raised to the Jacobite Peerage by King James II, for whom he raised a cavalry troop known as the “Yellow Horse”, acted a right-hand man to Patrick Sarsfield at the Battle of the Boyne and was a signatory to the 1691 Treaty of Limerick. The family are believed to have remained in precarious residence until c.1760.
The round-cornered tower has mural chambers in both end walls and the fourth storey was a fine hall set over the uppermost of two vaults. There are several interestingly carved fireplaces.
Nearby, a ruined church contains several Purcell monuments.
Loughmoe Court 2008 (Photo by Rigger30)
The ruins are on private land.
The English name of the village is a mis-Anglicisation of the Irish original, better rendered in the name of the castle. The origins are tied up in a curious legend involving a savage pair of wild boars; the story can be read here.
Loughmore is
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