Carrignavar
Carrignavar is a village in County Cork, north of Cork city. It lies east of Whitechurch and west of the R614 road, by a bridge over the Cloghnagash River. Carrignavar is within the Cork North-Central Dáil constituency.History
A castle was built at Carrignavar by Donal or Daniel McCarthy, younger brother of the first Viscount Muskerry, of the MacCarthy of Muskerry family. It was said to have been the last fortress in Munster to fall to Cromwell. His descendants lived there into the nineteenth century, though, by 1840, little more than a square tower remained. In the eighteenth century, Charles MacCarthy was a Jacobite sympathiser and patron of late Gaelic poetry; he and his poets converted, at least in form, from Roman Catholicism to the Anglican Church of Ireland to escape the Penal Laws.
Carrignavar House, a castellated country house, was built beside the castle ruins in the late nineteenth century. John Sheedy bought it in the early twentieth century and later sold it to the Sacred Heart Fathers, who opened Sacred Heart College secondary school there in 1950.
