INSIDE A MEDIEVAL GAELIC CASTLE
FROM THE TWELFTH TO the seventeenth century, the MacDermots ruled the kingdom of Maigh Luirg in the Irish province of Connacht from a small island in Loch Cé (now Lough Key) known as the Rock. They were the right-hand men—and sometime rivals—of the O’Conors, the kings of Connacht, whose power center lay at the modern village of Tulsk, some 20 miles away. It was Diarmait, king of Maigh Luirg from 1124 until his death on the Rock in 1159, who gave the MacDermot clan its name.
In the sixteenth century, the king Brian MacDermot commissioned the Annals of Loch Cé, which remain among the most important written records of medieval Irish history. They are the primary source for the history of the kingdom of Maigh Luirg (Anglicized as Moylurg), which occupied roughly the same territory as the northern section of the modern county of Roscommon. The Annals, which survive in only two manuscripts written primarily in Early Modern Irish, with some sections in Latin, were compiled using earlier Irish annals as sources. They record more than five centuries of political, ecclesiastical, and military events, succession and land disputes, and even notes on the weather. They begin with the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, a contest that pitted Brian Boru, the high king of Ireland, against a coalition composed of the king of Dublin, Sigtrygg Silkbeard; the king of Leinster, Máel Mórda; and a force of Vikings from across the region. The Annals end in 1590, when most of the Gaelic families in Ireland, including the MacDermots, were thrown off their lands by the Anglo-Normans—the ruling class of England after the Norman Conquest in 1066—who had invaded Ireland centuries earlier, in 1169.
Surprisingly, there are relatively few references to the Rock of Loch Cé itself in the , or in other contemporaneous historical works. In 1187 (or 1184, scholars are not certain), the record that record periodic attacks on the Rock, countless clashes over succession, and the deaths of numerous MacDermot kings. But with only one exception—the mention of a “great, regal house” that was built on the Rock in 1578 by Brian MacDermot—nowhere are the buildings of a royal residence ever described.
