By Damian Murphy
The Mallow-born John ‘Johnny’ Roche (c. 1804–84) is remembered as a ‘character of Cork’ not only for his devil-may-care attitude to life but also on the strength of the eccentric architectural legacy that he left in his wake.
The young Roche displayed an aptitude for carpentry, ironmongery and stonemasonry on the family farm but, as a restless spirit and a romantic, he eloped to America with the daughter of a neighbouring farmer. He quickly found himself suited neither to marriage nor to the New World and, bucking the trend, crossed back over the Atlantic just as many of his fellow Corkonians joined the States-bound exodus at the outbreak of the Great Famine. Leasing a site on the bank of the Awbeg River, 13km north of Mallow, and undaunted by a lack of any experience in the textile industry, he took to wool-combing in a mill built by his own hand and equipped with machinery of his own design.
Roche turned his attention to his magnum opus in the summer of 1847 and laid the foundations of a castle which, like the mill before it, was a solo endeavour in conception and construction. The stone was quarried on site and raised to each course with the assistance of a home-made winch, the sand was dug from the bed of the Awbeg and the lime was brought from Mallow in a cart of his own invention fitted with a fireplace. The castle kept Roche occupied for three summers, although an inscribed stone reclaimed from a later viaduct (Roche having entered the field of civil engineering) gives the misleading date of 1870.
The castle centres on a rectangular tower of three storeys made bow-ended by four-storey turrets, semi-ovoid in plan, the walls showing a pronounced incline from base to parapet. It was originally entered by ‘a massive panelled door, its timber jambs wrought with curious ornaments, lighted overhead by a semi-circular fanlight fifteen inches high’. The windows were small and square with the exception of those on the uppermost floors of the turrets, which were circular. The exterior was plainly finished except for the parapets, where Roche made an excursion into fine art and handcrafted from stone and wood ‘gaping and grinning monsters [who] kept stern vigil on the battlements’.
The ground floor of the castle included three rooms—forge, store and workshop—but the labyrinthine arrangement of the upper floors was such that contemporary accounts admitted that ‘a description of them would lead but to confusion’. Access to the upper floors of the turrets was by a staircase which Roche, a keen musician who made his own instruments, was known to climb when the mood took him ‘to indulge his peculiar pastime of loudly blowing a horn’.
Castle Curious has been silent since Roche died of pneumonia in February 1884, but even in decay it is a much-loved local landmark rising above the wooded bank of the Awbeg. Roche always intended his castle to serve as his home in life and as his memorial after death and, as his wish to be buried in its shadow was not granted, it is deserving of a slight rewording of his self-composed epitaph:
Here stands the castle of poor John Roche, He had his faults but don’t reproach; For when alive his heart was mellow, An artist, genius and comic fellow.
Damian Murphy is Architectural Heritage Officer, NIAH. Series based on the NIAH’s ‘building of the month’, www.buildingsofireland.ie.