Carlow Castle, the county museum and College Street

Carlow's history is not hidden, exactly, but it is not signposted either. The castle is a single wall at the end of a side street, the 1798 memorial is on a roundabout, and the county museum is through the tourist office door. This is what is there, what you can get into, and what it costs, which is mostly nothing.

Carlow Castle: what you can actually see

Start with expectations. Carlow Castle today is the west wall of a rectangular keep with a drum tower at each end, standing over the Barrow at Castle Hill. There is no interior, no ticket office and no guide. It is a National Monument in the care of the Office of Public Works, which lists it as an unguided site.

What it lacks in rooms it makes up for in story. The OPW dates the stone castle to between 1208 and 1213 and attributes it to William Marshal, who held the Lordship of Leinster through his wife Isabel de Clare. It belongs to a small group of four-towered keeps, along with Ferns in Co. Wexford, Lea in Co. Laois and the original castle at Kilkenny. In the late fourteenth century a third storey was added to house the Irish Exchequer and its clerks. The Crown confiscated it in 1537, Cromwell's forces took it in 1650, and then in 1814 it was granted to a local physician, Dr Philip Parry Middleton, who wanted it for a lunatic asylum. To clear the vaulted interior faster he set explosive charges at its base. The eastern half of the castle collapsed, and the rest had to be taken down for safety, leaving the two towers and the wall you see now.

As for access: the OPW told the Dáil in 2021 that the site had been open to the public since 29 October that year, after works, with localised fencing to keep visitors back from some of the walls, and that people could still see the castle from all sides. The OPW does not publish hours or access days, so if you find it fenced off, walk on to Graiguecullen Bridge and down onto the towpath on the far bank, which is where the castle looks best. Allow twenty minutes.

The museum behind the tourist office

Carlow County Museum is on College Street, sharing the old Presentation convent with the county library and the tourist office, and you walk into it through the tourist office. It is run by Carlow County Council with the Carlow Historical and Archaeological Society, and admission is free.

Four galleries, and three things in them you should not leave without seeing. The gallows trapdoor from Carlow Gaol, used in public executions in the nineteenth century. The carved wooden pulpit from the cathedral across the road, six metres of it. And the room on the Carlow sugar factory, which the Irish Free State opened here in 1926 and which ran for almost eighty years. There is also a section on John Tyndall, the nineteenth-century Carlow scientist the museum credits with discovering the greenhouse effect, and a 340-million-year-old fossil. Opening days change with the season and the museum's own hours page still carries notices from 2022 and 2023, so ring 059 913 1554 before planning around a weekend.

College Street

Once you are out of the museum you are already in what the town calls its Cultural Quarter. The Cathedral of the Assumption, designed by Thomas Cobden and completed in 1833, is across the road. Next to it is Carlow College, St Patrick's, whose college building dates from the 1790s, and in its grounds is VISUAL, the contemporary art centre and George Bernard Shaw Theatre. VISUAL's galleries are free and open Tuesday to Saturday from eleven to half five and on Sunday afternoons; the building closes on Mondays. Lennons, downstairs, is the obvious lunch.

Up on the Dublin Road, a couple of minutes north, the courthouse stands on its broad flight of steps behind a columned portico, and it is worth the short detour for the front alone.

1798 and the Liberty Tree

The town's hardest history is from 1798, when the United Irishmen attacked Carlow and were beaten back. The killing that followed is put at around six hundred, rebels and civilians, and the dead were buried in the Croppies' Grave on '98 Street in Graiguecullen. The memorial most people pass without noticing is the Liberty Tree, John Behan's bronze on the roundabout where Kennedy Avenue meets the Potato Market. Stop and look at it on your way between the castle and Tullow Street.

Out of town: two more

If you have a car, finish with Brownshill Dolmen, a little over three kilometres east on the R726. It is a Neolithic portal tomb, and its granite capstone, which Carlow Tourism puts at over 100 tonnes, rests on two portal stones and a door stone at the front and slopes back onto a low boulder. The OPW reopened it in 2022 with a fenced path from the road. North-east of town, Duckett's Grove is the Gothic shell of the Duckett family house, gutted by fire in 1933, with two restored walled gardens around it. Carlow County Council bought it in 2005 and runs it as a free park, with free guided tours from the courtyard at 12:30 and 14:30 on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays for most of the year.