Was Mícheál Ó Cléirigh born in Kilbarron Castle?

On the 400th anniversary of honouring Mícheál Ó Cléirigh’s return to Ireland this summer, Donegal historians are now learning more about the recorded facts of Ó Cléirigh’s life in south Donegal.

While the Mícheál Ó Cléirigh Summer School states on their website that Mícheál Ó Cléirigh “was born at Kilbarron Castle” c.1590, there are, in fact, no historical records of Ó Cléirigh in Kilbarron, nor are there any historic maps of Kilbarron Castle from Ó Cléirigh’s childhood.

The only local historical records of Ó Cléirigh are his own words, which he wrote “at Drowes”, and the Louvain Papers record of the Franciscan house at “Bundrowis.” Together, these records clearly establish Mícheál writing the Annals of the Four Masters on the Donegal side of the Drowes, at Bundrowes friary in Magheracar, Bundoran, in Magh Ene, from 1626 to 1637. The Summer School's website still omits the Franciscan Louvain Papers record of Bundrowes.

In the Annals of the Four Masters, Ó Cléirigh makes many references to Bundrowes Castle, located near the Convent of Donegal at Bundrowes, yet he remarkably makes only one reference to “Kilbarron”: the destruction of Kilbarron Castle in 1390.

Archaeologists claim that “the surviving ruins of this O’Clery stronghold undoubtedly post-date the destruction of the site in 1390 (AFM).” Although the castle was rebuilt, no other documented account of “Kilbarron Castle” exists from 1390 until it is described in The Civil Survey (1654-1656) as “the ruined walls of an old castle called Kilbarren.”

Mícheál’s childhood in south Donegal was defined by the Nine Years’ War (1593-1603). During this wartime period, the ruined Kilbarron Castle was no longer the thriving Gaelic scholarly community it once had been in its glory years. In reality, Kilbarron in the 1590s was a warzone: one of the last remaining Gaelic strongholds resisting England’s final Tudor conquest of Ireland.

In 1592, Ó Cléirigh chronicles that Tirconnell was plundered and ravaged by two English captains, Captain Willis and Captain Conwell. Ó Cléirigh records that the only two O’Donnell castles that stood were Ballyshannon Castle and Donegal Castle. Kilbarron Castle is not recorded by Ó Cléirigh.

During Mícheál’s childhood, Kilbarron was garrisoned by English troops intermittently in the 1590s. Four kilometres southeast of the ruined Kilbarron Castle, English soldiers were lodged at Abbey Assaroe after the Battle of Belleek in 1593, “purposing to invade” O’Donnell’s Ballyshannon Castle.

In 1593-94, O’Donnell judged that his frontier castles were of strategic use to the English, and so he “hath broken down the two castles of Bundrowes and Belleek.” The ruined Kilbarron Castle held no strategic importance for either the English or O’Donnell.

At the Battle of Ballyshannon in 1597, the English army was encamped in Kilbarron at Abbey Assaroe. English troops then positioned their cannons on the mound of Mullaghnashee and fired their “loud-sounding, red, shot-vomiting guns” at O’Donnell’s Ballyshannon Castle.

For Mícheál and his family, the Nine Years’ War was not just a wartime record from the distant past; it was their lived family history, experienced and endured in real time. Mícheál was a child of what I call “The Tirconnell-Tudor Troubles.” His birth name, Tadhg an tSléibhe (Tadhg of the Mountain) gives a clue to his childhood whereabouts during the Nine Years’ War.

As noted by the late Bundoran historian, Fr. Paddy Gallagher, Mícheál’s nickname “of the Mountain” probably refers “to his place of fosterage in his youth, when the Erneside was often in the frontline of the Nine Years’ War.”

While it is poetic to picture Mícheál’s birthplace as Kilbarron Castle, the recorded history points more strongly to the castle having already been abandoned or ruined before Mícheál was born in c.1590.

This likelihood is also supported by the fact that no historic maps show Kilbarron Castle standing in the 1590s. Many of these maps identify the key strategic sites such as the Cistercian Abbey of Assaroe and O’Donnell’s strongholds of Bundrowes Castle in Magheracar, Bundoran and Ballyshannon Castle. Kilbarron Castle is never identified.

Abbey Assaroe, Bundrowes Castle and Ballyshannon Castle are all drawn and labelled on Jobson’s 1590s map, McMahon’s 1591 map and Baxter’s c.1599 map, but Kilbarron Castle is not drawn or labelled. The Map of the Six Escheated Counties of Ulster (1609) draws and labels what appears to be the ruined Kilbarron Church, but again, there is no sign of Kilbarron Castle.

The earliest historic map that may identify a ruined Kilbarron Castle is the Down Survey map c.1655. However, the plantation map does not draw and label it as “Kilbarron Castle”, but as “The Ruins of a Stone House.”

Unfortunately, the myth of Mícheál Ó Cléirigh being “born at Kilbarron Castle” is just a myth. The 17th century Ó Cléirigh Book of Genealogies records that the Ó Cléirighs possessed family lands in three south Donegal parishes: Kilbarron, Drumhome and Magh Ene.

During the Erneside turmoil of the Nine Years’ War, Mícheál’s birthplace could have been anywhere on the Ó Cléirigh family lands, either north or south of the Erne, but no definite historical record survives to prove exactly where he was born.