The Blarney Stone

Blarney Castle was built around 1446 by Cormac Láidir Mac Cárthaigh, lord of Muskerry — the third castle on the site, replacing a wooden fortification of the previous century. It is one of the great square Gaelic-period tower-houses, six storeys high with walls eighteen feet thick at the base, and the McCarthys of Muskerry held it as their principal seat for the next two and a half centuries.

The legend of the Blarney Stone — that a kiss bestows the gift of fluent and persuasive speech — has been a global tourist anchor since the late Victorian period. The form of the legend, the climbing of the parapet, the upside-down lean over the machicolation, the kiss of the precise block of dark limestone built into the south-east battlement: all of that is no older than the 1820s. The first guidebook account of the practice dates to 1825; the first published story attaching the gift to the stone is later still.

What is genuinely 16th-century, and genuinely owed to a McCarthy, is the underlying English word 'blarney' for plausible verbal evasion. Cormac Teige McCarthy, lord of Muskerry under Elizabeth I, was repeatedly summoned to submit formally to the Crown's policy of surrender-and-regrant — by which a Gaelic chief would surrender his title to the queen and receive it back as an English peerage, with English laws of inheritance. McCarthy played an extended diplomatic game across the 1580s — letters of intent, courteous evasions, plausible delays, missed deadlines, polite explanations, more letters of intent. The Tudor administration's frustration is preserved in the State Papers; one tradition has Elizabeth herself remark, on receiving yet another McCarthy letter, 'this is all Blarney — what he says he never means'.

Whether Elizabeth said the line precisely is undocumented; the underlying tradition is solid, and the word entered the English language from her court. McCarthy died holding Muskerry in 1583. His descendants lost the castle in the Williamite confiscations of 1691; it passed through several hands before being acquired by the Jefferyes family in 1703 and the Colthursts later in the 18th century. The Colthursts hold it still. Their tour-operator descendants take a small fee and a count of visitors that runs to roughly four hundred thousand a year — most of whom go up the parapet, and most of whom, the staff will quietly tell you, do not in fact kiss the stone but rather pretend to in front of the camera.