Dunsoghly Castle

Dunsoghly Castle stands at Dunsoghly, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and was erected by members of the Plunket family, who were part of the Irish legal and landed elite.

The main tower was constructed around 1450 for Sir Thomas Plunket, who served as a senior judge in the Irish common-law system; one record alternatively names Sir Rowland Plunkett as the builder. The builder’s grandson, Sir John Plunket, is recorded as later holding a chief judicial office in one of the common-law courts. By the late sixteenth century the site acquired a small chapel to the south of the tower, which bears the date 1573 above its doorway together with the Instruments of the Passion and the initials of Sir John Plunket and his third wife, Jenet Sarsfield.

During the mid-seventeenth century defensive earthworks were laid out on the west and south sides of the castle, features attributed to the conflicts of that period and in some accounts dated specifically to the 1670s. The Plunket(t) family continued to occupy the house and lands into the nineteenth century, remaining on the property until the 1870s and, by some reckonings, keeping the site within the same family for over four hundred years. Ownership passed into state hands in 1914 and the Office of Public Works now manages the monument. The timber roof of the tower attracted attention in later centuries and was used as a model when roofs were reconstructed at Bunratty Castle and Rothe House. In 1995 the castle was used as the filming location for the Edinburgh Castle scenes in the motion picture Braveheart.