Lisheen Castle History

The Early Years

The earliest record of the Lloyd connection with Lisheen townland is to be found in the will of John Lloyd Esq., dated 1770, which records that he was in possession of the lands of the Lisheen, Ballyerc and Lisdonowly by that date through purchase from George Grace. He was also in possession of an impressive number of other townlands in the Templemore / Loughmore area. From this deed it would seem that he parcelled out his landholdings among his sons. John, his eldest son, got Cranagh and Lloydsboro, Thomas got lands in the Borrisnoe area, George got Kilolonagh, Henry Jesse got Castleiney, and Fredrick got Lisheen, and the two adjacent townlands, namely Ballerk and Lisdonowly.

Frederick, who like his other brothers, apart from George, was educated in Trinity College, married Julia Vereker of Roxborough, Co Limerick. He inherited some other lands in Co Cork named Ballymacrease, probably from his father. When he took up residence in Lisheen is undetermined. His eldest son, John, was born towards the end of the 1700’s and is recorded on a school list of 1803. Whether Frederick was living in Lisheen by that date is not known, but is seems that he came there sometime fairly early in century, where according to tradition, he occupied a three storey Georgian house built by Grace on the site of the later castle.

Frederick Lloyd is mentioned in a report dated July 1822, as leasing or renting land in Lisheen to a farmer named John Maher, and there is a letter in the National Archives from Frederick, dated August 1822, written to Dublin Castle regarding the return to the neighbourhood of some apparently notorious character named Edmund Delahunty. These show that Frederick was still the landlord of Lisheen at that time. It was probably he who embarked on the building of the present castle, which according to tradition was built around the Georgian house in stages. There is no record as to when the work started, but it may have been very early in the century. It is thought that he began building it for his son and heir, John, who got married to Catherine Rotton, of Bath, England. The date 1808 is given in Burke’s Irish Family Records, p.731, as the date of marriage, but that appears to be too early a date for it, as his earliest child was not born until 1821. Frederick appears to have returned to Limerick City, as the inscription on the tomb of another son, named Frederick after him, and dated 1832, records him as ‘of Fortfield House.’ Frederick Junior was a lieutenant in the army, and died at the early age of 41 years. He was the first of the Lisheen Lloyds to be buried in Cooleeny.

The earliest recorded mention of the castle is to be found in the Tithe Applotment Book of 1827, where John Lloyd Esq., ‘of the Castle’ is listed as paying tithes on parcels of land amounting to around 122acres, plantation measure. It was apparently fairly imposing by the mid-1830s as Lewis’ Topographical Dictionary, published in 1837, described it as ‘a handsome castellated building.’ But John apparently continued to add to the structure, as the O’Donovan letters, dated 1841; state that Mr Lloyd was ‘now building a new castle.’ The police barracks across the road from the castle entrance was built sometime after 1836, and is first mentioned in the rate book of 1842. It is also shown in the OS map of 1841.

The castle is a battlemented Tudor-style structure, with side turrets, and a central machicolated turret enclosing the main doorway. Such castle-like structures in revivalist styles were in vogue in that early Victorian period. Lisheen is a more modest version of the impressive castellated residences built in the first half of the nineteenth century, such as Charleville, near Tullamore, designed by Francis Johnston, Castle Bernard, near Kinnity, Co Offaly, Blackrock Castle, Cork, designed by James and George Richard Pain, and Glenstal, near Murroe, now a Benedictine Abbey.

John and Catherine had a family of at least five. As already mentioned, his first child, Charles Henry, was born in 1821. John was appointed a magistrate, and as such took Archdeacon Rev Henry Cotton, the rector of the Church of Ireland parish of Thurles, to task for criticising the local magistrates in a letter to a Dublin newspaper, alleging an unwillingness on their part to play a more positive role in the matter of the collection of the tithes. There is an exchange of letters on the part of both of them in the Tipperary Free Press of 1832, when the Tithe War was at its most tense period in Thurles and its neighbourhood. Lloyd signed his letters as simply as John Lloyd, Lisheen.

The next we hear of him is as involved in committees as the distress of the Great Famine first began to reach alarming proportions in the course of 1846. At a public meeting in April in Thurles courthouse called to devise means of creating employment for the labouring classes, and to urge landowners to subscribe to such employment projects, and towards a fund to procure food for the destitute, John Lloyd was appointed on a committee to carry out the objectives of the meeting. All the other JPs in the Thurles Union were on the committee, as was Archbishop Slattery, and Archdeacon Cotton, and the other parish clergy.

At a later meeting in the town John Lloyd proposed that a committee of the clergy of all denominations, the magistrates, and the Poor Law Guardians, be appointed in each parish for ascertaining what employment projects in each of them would be beneficial both to the labourers and their localities. He was appointed chairman of the Moyne Relief Committee, which was set up in August 1846. Towards the close of that year the parish priest, Fr Patrick Larkin, wrote to Dublin stating that the poor in the parish were in ‘an awful state of destitution’, and that he feared an outbreak when the public works would come to an end. There were five public works schemes going on in the parish in that winter of 1846/47, and the relief committee was praised in the Tipperary Vindicator for its efficiency.

John Lloyd was a member of the board of guardians of the Thurles Union at least by 1852, and he may have been a member as early as 1850. He was also a member of the dispensary committee of management of Moyne/Templetouhy/Loughmore. His namesake, John of Lloydsboro and Cranagh, was also a member of the board, and it was he who made Cranagh available on lease as an auxiliary workhouse in 1850. (He had acquired Cranagh through his marriage to his cousin, Debby Ann, only daughter and heiress of John Lloyd and Amy Brazier of Cranagh).

Catherine, the wife of John of Lisheen, died in 1853, and it was family lore that he was so grief-stricken that he decided to emigrate to Canada. Records, however, show that he was remarried in Dublin the following year, 1854, to Mary Ann Minton or Minchen. He and his new wife emigrated the following year, 1856, and settled on Ontario, where a second family was started. John became involved in railway construction in Canada, probably in the role of engineer, in which profession he may have qualified while in Trinity College. Family lore also tells that Lisheen was in financial straits at the time, due likely to the building costs incurred in the castle, and the subsequent Great Famine, which partially at least impoverished many estates. John’s only other son, Frederick, also emigrated to Canada, but at what stage is not on record.

A daughter, Catherine married William Butler of Drom. Charles Henry succeeded to Lisheen and its estate in 1856, if not before that. He was then thirty five years of age, and was to remain as landlord until 1887. He was appointed to the Moyne dispensary committee by at least 1857.

In the Tipperary by election of October 1866 following the death of John Blake Dillon, the erstwhile young Irelander, the two candidates were Captain Charles White, who was the sitting member for Dublin County, and a liberal Protestant, and Laurence Waldron, a Catholic barrister, who was the conservative candidate. White won the seat, but a petition was later presented against his return, and a select committee was appointed by the House of Commons to investigate. The investigation threw much light on the conduct of that intensely contested election and all the passion it generated.

Lisheen Castle was marginally drawn into it through the staying there of Captain Richard Cooper, an absentee landlord, who lived in Northamptonshire. He owned the townland of Ballyknockane, and came to Ireland regularly for the fishing season. As a landowner he was entitled to vote in the Tipperary election, and he was probably invited over by Charles Lloyd and other supporters of Waldron, to organise the voting of his tenants.

Such was the rivalry between the supporters of the two candidates that Cooper’s tenants who had votes refused to travel to the polling booth in Thurles unless they had police protection. John Lloyd ensured that such protection would be available, and early in the morning of the election day there was an escort of twenty dragoons, and some mounted police under the command of the resident magistrate, Gore Jones, drawn up outside the castle. There too were thirty four of Cooper’s tenants, and probably as many more of Lloyd’s, all of whom would be required to vote according to their landlord’s wishes. The secret ballot did not come in until eight years later.

Landlord and tenants needed all the protection they could get for their voting that day. As Cooper and his tenants made their way along the road to Thurles they got hissed at certain points by White’s supporters, but that was only a minor affair compared with the jostling and abuse they got as they made their way through the narrow crowded Jail Street in the town to the tally room, where the final mustering and counting of Waldron voters took place. Despite the heavy police and military presence a hostile crowd tried to prevent them coming out of the tally room and crossing the street to the courthouse to vote by a show of hands. Cooper himself was at the receiving end of stick-wielding, mud-slinging opponents, and when he and his tenants managed to vote they opted to make their way back to Ballyknockane and Lisheen by taking to the fields and going cross-country.

The end of the 1870s and the 1880s was a period of severe economic depression, which activated the beginning of the so-called Land War. Some landlords responded to the distress or at least the down-turn in the returns of the tenant farmers by voluntarily reducing rents by from 15% to as much as 25%. The tenant farmers generally would have been satisfied if the rents were reduced to Griffith’s valuation level, which was popularly called the government rent, and which was that accepted as the standard of a fair rent by the Land League, founded by Michael Davitt at that time.

Among those landlords, however, who attempted to hold a tough line were Charles Lloyd and his old friend Cooper. Lloyd seemed to have deliberately scaled up the rent by demanding as much as 50% above Griffith’s valuation, probably to precipitate the eviction of defaulting tenants. When the Land League threatened him with a boycott, and declared they would hold what they called an indignation meeting ‘very convenient’ to Lisheen Castle, Charles Lloyd backed off temporarily. Fr William Power, the assertive and deeply politicised parish priest of Moyne-Templetouhy at the time, came to Lisheen Castle to request Charles Lloyd to agree to get his rent settled through arbitration. He gave a verbal promise of some kind that he would do that, but then went back on it. A little later he served writs of ejectment on nine of his tenants, including Michael Everard, who was a vocal and active Land Leaguer, and the great grandfather of the present owner and restorer of Lisheen Castle.

The end of the 1870s and the 1880s was a period of severe economic depression, which activated the beginning of the so-called Land War. Some landlords responded to the distress or at least the down-turn in the returns of the tenant farmers by voluntarily reducing rents by from 15% to as much as 25%. The tenant farmers generally would have been satisfied if the rents were reduced to Griffith’s valuation level, which was popularly called the government rent, and which was that accepted as the standard of a fair rent by the Land League, founded by Michael Davitt at that time.

Among those landlords, however, who attempted to hold a tough line were Charles Lloyd and his old friend Cooper. Lloyd seemed to have deliberately scaled up the rent by demanding as much as 50% above Griffith’s valuation, probably to precipitate the eviction of defaulting tenants. When the Land League threatened him with a boycott, and declared they would hold what they called an indignation meeting ‘very convenient’ to Lisheen Castle, Charles Lloyd backed off temporarily. Fr William Power, the assertive and deeply politicised parish priest of Moyne-Templetouhy at the time, came to Lisheen Castle to request Charles Lloyd to agree to get his rent settled through arbitration. He gave a verbal promise of some kind that he would do that, but then went back on it. A little later he served writs of ejectment on nine of his tenants, including Michael Everard, who was a vocal and active Land Leaguer, and the great grandfather of the present owner and restorer of Lisheen Castle.