Why are humans so cruel?
Certain travel experiences cannot help but stick indelibly in your memory. Inspiring, outstandingly good, stunning, bad, or just plain embarrassing; they all combine to become part of your travel narratives.
I have never written much about the time I came upon Leap Castle in County Offaly, Ireland, simply because it freaked me out so much at the time, sent shivers of dread down my spine the like of which I had never experienced before.
I was reminded of similar feelings visiting the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the endless rof Commonwealth war graves from the Battle of El Alamein in the Egyptian desert. Just realising how cruel and horrible humans can be, especially to our own species. And we haven’t learnt a thing. Look at Gaza.
The day had started well, negotiating my rental car out of Dublin through endless roadworks to end up on the George Bennet Route through Counties Carlow, Kildare and Laois. This now scenic drive through Ireland’s southern heart staged the first George Bennet Cup Motor Race in 1903, precursor to the modern-day Formula One Grand Prix. International competitors drove hell for leather, slowing down only through villages where they would be escorted through behind two men peddling bicycles and holding up red flags.
I recall writing up my notes at the end of the route, then stopping in the village of Roscrae to talk to a tourism contact I had been given. “You must see Leap Castle just down the road,” she suggested after showing me around the quaint village.
We pulled up outside the castle midafternoon. The place had an eerie feeling, a score or so ravens screeching as they came and went from the lofty battlements. Climbing a few stone stairs we found the wide front door open, as if inviting us into the entrance hall where a fire burned in the hearth under a massive mantlepiece. Welcoming you might think? Not at all, and despite calling out we could not muster anyone.
My look around was cursory, but the feeling I got from that short visit prompted me to that night start researching the castle’s history. ‘Ireland’s most haunted castle’ came up first, but as I dug deeper its cruel history began to emerge.
Built by the O’Bannon Clan around 1250, Leap Castle was originally called ‘Léim Uí Bhanáin’, referring to the fertile land surrounding it associated with the clan. Bannons were “secondary chieftains”, subject to the ruling O’Carroll clan. Archeological evidence suggests the castle was constructed on the same site as an ancient stone structure, ceremonial in nature, and that it had been occupied consistently since at least the Iron Age (500 BCE) and possibly since Neolithic times.
Intense O’Carroll rivalries are recorded including a story of one brother fatally stabbing another in the ‘Bloody Chapel’ in front of his family. In 1659 the castle passed by marriage into the ownership of the Darby family, and it was during renovations that workmen discovered the hidden oubliette behind the chapel.
Widely used during the cruel Middle Ages, remains of oubliettes were incorporated into castles from Ireland and Wales across to modern day Turkey. Essentially, they are narrow vertical shafts connected to a lower dungeon where doomed victims could be thrown to slowly starve or go mad. The word derives from the French, oublier, meaning to forget.
But the Leap Castle’s oubliette was different. The workmen found the shaft full of a multitude of human remains impaled on upward pointing wooden spikes protruding from the wall. It took three big cartloads to clean the remains out.
Who was responsible for inflicting such a cruel slow death on so many victims? Did the castle’s inhabitants get great satisfaction from hearing the suffering cries of their victims as they died slowly from impalement? The number of remains indicate no attempt was ever made to remove them, they were just left to rot. Imagine the stench!
Most likely it was a systematic plan of the O’Carroll clan to dispose of their enemies, probably by tricking them to attend a mass or banquet before being thrown down the shaft which possibly had a hinged floor. No other oubliette known in history killed so many people so effectively.
Not surprisingly today, the castle’s horrific history attracts tourists, our curiosity for cruelty still plainly apparent. The castle is now billed as the most haunted in all Ireland, the Red Lady ghost who goes around holding a blood-stained dagger being the most famous and the subject of many paranormal investigations and TV shows.
Who would want to own such a death chamber? In 1974 the largely dilapidated castle was bought by Australian historian Peter Bartlett, whose mother had been a Banon. Bartlett, together with builder Joe Sullivan, carried out extensive restoration work on the castle up to the time of the owner’s death in 1989. Two years later, the castle was sold to its current owners. Since 1991, the castle has been privately owned by the musician and storyteller Sean Ryan and his wife Anne, who continue the restoration work of the castle which has such a macabre history of cruelty.