Leap Castle

People have been standing on this spot for a very long time before anybody built a castle on it.

Leap Castle is in Roscrea, County Offaly, about 6 kilometres north of the town and 10 kilometres south of Kinnitty on the R421. Accounts of when the main tower and keep went up range from the 13th century to the late 15th, but most likely around 1250. The O'Bannon clan built it, and it was originally Léim Uí Bhanáin, the Leap of the O'Bannons, a name that covered the fertile land around it as well. The O'Bannons were secondary chieftains here, subject to the ruling O'Carroll clan.

Underneath is the part worth knowing. There is evidence the castle was built on the site of another ancient stone structure, possibly ceremonial, and that this ground has been occupied continuously since at least the Iron Age, from around 500 BCE, and possibly since Neolithic times.

The Annals of the Four Masters record that Gerald FitzGerald, Earl of Kildare, tried and failed to seize the castle in 1513, came back in 1516, and managed to partially demolish it.

The castle's own site is unusually well organised about what it holds. It separates the documented history, covering construction and remodelling, a 3D rendering of the building, the 1500s interior layout, and the successive families who lived here, the O'Carrolls, the Darbys and the Ryans, from the hauntings, which it lists individually: the Governess and the Old Man, the Priest's House, the Murder Hole Room, the Red Lady, the Bloody Chapel, and the entity the owners call the Elemental.

That separation is the right way round, and it makes the castle a better visit than the reputation suggests.