A history of Turlough Round Tower
By Tom Gillespie
APART from the picturesque landscape of Turlough, the ancient round tower is a famous architectural landmark, towering many feet above the tall beeches in the vicinity, and few places in the country have been the object of so much interest or the target for so many cameras.
So claimed an article in The Connaught Telegraph on June 13, 1953, headed ‘Turlough down the years’.
The article continued: Standing on a hillock overlooking the village in which Turlough village rests, it tapers in grey stone to a height of 70 feet and is capped by a conical or painted roof from which a lightning conductor emerges to save it from destruction.
To the onlooker it may well appear as one solid block, but it is actually a hollow or tub building with ledges jutting out here and there on the inside to support the ladders that were used to reach the top where four narrow windows, facing north, south, east and west, afford an excellent view of the surrounding district to a radius of many miles.
Access to the tower could be got through a square entrance or doorway on the south side, but this is now closed to the public.
The date on which the tower was built is not easy to ascertain with any degree of accuracy, but from the date 1025, which appears on a sculpted slab on the west side of the cruciform ruins of the adjoining church whose masonry is similar to that of the tower, one can assume that it was built in the early part of the 11th century.
As to why this and similar towers were built many theories have been advanced by historians and archaeologists, some of them sane and sensible, others fanciful and absurd.
Local legend gives us an answer more valuable perhaps as a piece of folklore than as a solution to the controversial problem.
It broadly asserts that the round tower at Turlough was built by a chieftain as a watch tower from which he could survey his large estates at Turlough.
Reputed to be a selfish and jealous man, he engaged one of the best builders in the country to do the work; the builder was knows as ‘Gubaun Saor’.
When the tower was completed, the chieftain is said to have viewed it with a great sense of pride as the best in the province and of which, in his jealousy, he wanted no equal. But how was this to be prevented?
The ‘Gubaun Saor’ had built many towers, one better than the other, and there was nothing to prevent him from building a still better one. No. Nothing except his destruction.
The chieftain gave the matter careful consideration; a man in his position could not face the accusation of cowardly cold-blooded murder, which would, naturally, be avenged.
There must be another way out - and that one cruel way was to remove the scaffolding and leave the ‘Gubaun Saor’ to starve and perish on the top of the tower.
On the second day of his plight he prayed, hoped, and finally despaired, when an old woman, bent with age, appeared at dusk on the road unseen and unheard by anyone but the ‘Gubaun Saor’ and said up to him in Irish: “Is it not easier to knock two stones that put one up,” and before he had time to think the old woman had vanished.
He knocked all through the night, but had not made very much progress at the break of dawn, when the old woman is said to have appeared again, this time with a long rope which the ‘Gubaun Saor’ thought was impossible to get to the top of the tower, but she had him take off his socks, rip the loose thread at the end and let it down to her.
This she attached to the rope, which he hauled up and tied around one of the protruding ledges, and by this means he descended to the ground and escaped safely to the nearby woods.
Another version of this legend says that after the Gubaun Saor had knocked a certain amount of the tower he was promised a reprieve, but that as he was descending on the newly erected scaffolding, it was pulled from beneath him and that he was killed.
Well, so much for the local legend, which is, perhaps, as informative as some of the theories put forward by the old historians.
Many fanciful theories can be disregarded in favour of George Petrie’s own judgement.
Petrie was a man who did great work for Irish archaeology. He was a man of extensive learning who went to great pains in search of the truth in his studies of ancient architecture.
He visited the round towers and examined them closely and did much research before finally passing judgement.
The theory that the round towers were built by the Danes was quickly discounted, for it was soon discovered that the Danes did more destruction than construction; that they plundered, burned and left in ruins many churches in the country.
Armagh was plundered six times, Kildare five times, Clonmacnoise four times and many other churches met similar fates.
In 867 Armagh was both plundered and burned by the Danes, and 1,000 persons were either killed by the battle axe or burned alive in the building into which they were driven.
Petrie asserts that the round towers were built for the protection of the inmates of the chief churches in the country against the marauding Danes, who were out to seize the precious sacred objects therein, such as chalices, shrines, manuscripts, etc.
A look-out was kept from the top of the tower for the advancing foe and sufficient warning given to have all the sacred vessels placed in safety from the nearby churches, out of the each of the plunderers, in the tower, on which the battle axe, one of the most effective weapons of war in being at the time, had no effect on the strong stone building, built round because it was harder to remove a stone, than from a square one, and in which the entrance was placed high up to make it less vulnerable in defence.
Around the tower are the family graves of many generations of the people of Turlough parish, some marked with old flat tombstones.