Search Results for 'Blakes Castle'

Blake’s Castle is a medieval urban fortified town house at the bottom of Quay Street which was built c1470 with single bay ground and first floors and a two-bay second floor. It has a flat roof with a crenelated parapet with a projecting machicolation on supporting corbels on the top floor above the entrance. This was an opening at the parapet through which defenders could drop material such as boiling water or hot pitch down on would-be attackers. It was built with coursed roughly dressed limestone rubble walls with square headed window openings to the upper floors.

This drawing of Blake’s Castle was done in 1847 by George Victor Du Noyer, a Dublin born artist, geologist, and antiquarian who spent much of his life recording natural features and archeological sites around the country in the 19th century.

“The Younger Women with their cloaks draped around their heads looked piquant enough, their faces had not unfrequently the sweetest expression of passion, and their lips pouted charmingly. The old fisher-wives, on the other hand, who sat near the casks and smoked damp tobacco in short clay pipes, had something witchlike and menacing about them.” So wrote Julius Rodenberg in 1860. He obviously had a thing for beautiful young Galway women as he also wrote about them elsewhere. As for the older women, I would say they just glared at him because he did not buy any fish. Otherwise, what he wrote could be true of our 1908 photograph.