A neighbour’s story — Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller, an O’Hara castle, and an unbroken Perceval line

Templehouse Manor is not an Ó Dubhda castle. The present house and the ruin beside its lake stand in the barony of Leyny, civil parish of Kilvarnet, a short ride west of Ballymote in County Sligo — inland country that lay outside the Uí Fiachrach Muaidhe heartland of Tireragh, and historically within the lordship of the O’Haras of Leyny. We record it here as a sister story: the same sweep of medieval dissolution, plantation and Ascendancy that reshaped our own territory passed through this landscape too, leaving stone, family and memory behind.

I. The Crusader-Knights’ Grant

The townland carries its origin in its name. logainm.ie records the Irish form as Teach an Teampla — “the house of the temple” — and preserves an eighteenth-century note: “There was one House belonging to the Knights Templars, whence it was call[ed] Tagh-Tempull, or Temple House.” A nineteenth-century topographical source adds that the site was “founded for Knights Templars in the reign of Henry the 3d.” That reign ran from 1216 to 1272, so no exact year is known; the castle is first recorded in 1271, when the Four Masters note that Hugh O’Conor demolished the castle of Teagh Templa.

The Templars, a crusading military order, built a castle on the lake shore. The Perceval family’s own research places this foundation as early as 1175-1181 ‐ before the antiquarian dating ‐ though we note that the earlier date is not corroborated by a contemporary medieval source and may be family memory rather than a dated construction.

When the Templar order was suppressed by Pope Clement V’s bull Vox in excelso on 22 March 1312 — the Irish arrests having begun in February 1308 — Templehouse passed, with much other Templar property across Christendom, to the Knights Hospitaller (the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem), whose priory of St John the Baptist at Rindown on Lough Ree held the title; some historians argue it went instead to the Crutched Friars. There is no evidence that either order ever lived here.

II. The O’Hara Castle, c.1360

As English crown power waned in the remote west during the fourteenth century, the O’Haras of Leyny, the principal native sept of the barony in which Templehouse stands, took possession of the site ‐ an Elizabethan inquisition of 1593 found the lands detained by Cormac O’Hara ‘without any right or title’. An O’Hara family manuscript credits Fergal Mór O’Hara and his son and grandson with the great tower, the porch, two small towers and the bawn, dating the work to 1303; later writers place the O’Hara castle around 1360 . The ivy-covered ruin visitors see today is most likely this O’Hara structure, not the Templar original.

Templehouse’s own Extended History preserves a further tradition: that an O’Hara may have been among the knights who received the Templar grant in the first place — a neat, if unprovable, loop. For the next two and a half centuries the site remained in Gaelic hands under Hospitaller nominal title, a pattern common across the late medieval west.

III. From Castle to Domestic House, 1627–1665

After the dissolution the Crown leased the lands, and James I granted them to Edward Crofton, of a family that had come to Ireland with Sir Henry Sidney. The Croftons converted the castle to a domestic residence in 1627, part of the widespread early-Stuart adaptation of tower houses to civilian use. In the rebellion of 1641 William Crofton held it against the O’Haras, the MacDonaghs of Corran and their allies; it was besieged and badly damaged.

Templehouse then passed to the Perceval family, an English gentry line, not by confiscation but by marriage. The Percevals trace themselves to a Norman companion of William the Conqueror; a sixteenth-century Perceval was granted Irish land for service to Elizabeth I. George Perceval married Mary Crofton, heiress to the Templehouse lands, in 1665 — the date the family has always given. (The Landed Estates Database at the University of Galway dates the marriage slightly later, c.1669.) Either way, the continuity is unusual: the family is still there in 2026.

This is a Planter succession, not a Gaelic inheritance. The Percevals settled on land that had passed out of O’Hara hands through the dissolution of the religious houses and a Crown grant to the Croftons. No Ó Dubhda hand touches this transfer.

IV. The Georgian and Victorian House

The Percevals occupied the adapted castle for almost a century before building a separate new house nearby around 1760. A generation later, Colonel Alexander Perceval (1787–1858) — Member of Parliament for County Sligo from 1831 to 1841, and Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Lords — built the five-bay neo-classical house that forms the core of the present building, c. 1820-1825, on higher ground above the castle. Its architect is not recorded; an attribution to John Lynn of Sligo appears in one modern magazine but is not supported by the Dictionary of Irish Architects.

A sober note from the famine years: Jane Perceval, wife of Colonel Alexander, died of famine fever in 1847 while assisting tenants. The family has kept this memory.

After Colonel Alexander’s death in 1858, debts from his costly election campaigns and the death duties forced the estate’s temporary sale to the Hall-Dare family. His third son, also Alexander Perceval, returned from a mercantile career in the Far East with sufficient fortune to buy Templehouse back and, around 1864, to enlarge the house greatly to plans by Johnstone and Jeanes of London ‐ adding a seven-bay block at right angles to the original, with cut-stone façades, creating the combined Georgian-Victorian mass visitors see today.

V. The Estate Today

Templehouse is still in Perceval hands — now stewarded by Roderick and Helena Perceval — and operates as a private country guest house on approximately 1,000 acres, overlooking a lake and the lakeside ruins of the medieval castle. The Congested Districts Board acquired over 3,200 acres of the former estate in the early twentieth century and redistributed much of it to local tenants; the house and the land immediately around it remained with the family. Access today is by booking only; the castle ruins are viewable by guests and by arrangement.

VI. Why Templehouse Is On This Site

We include Templehouse on our Homelands pages as one of five Estates & Historic Houses — later big houses of allied, Cromwellian, or Ascendancy families that sit within or adjacent to the older Ó Dubhda territory. None of the five is a direct Ó Dubhda castle. Templehouse, specifically, is in O’Hara country and passed through Templar, Hospitaller, Gaelic and Planter hands without ever being ours.

What the site shares with our own story is its shape: a Gaelic lordship, a crown dissolution, a plantation family, and, in the end, a building and a lineage that survive. For visitors following the Ó Dubhda trail through Sligo, Templehouse is worth an afternoon.

Sources

• Landed Estates Database (University of Galway): Temple House and the Perceval estate record
• logainm.ie: Teach an Teampla / Templehouse Demesne — the authoritative Irish placename record, including the 18th-century Tagh-Tempull etymology
• Temple House official site: History and Extended History
• Lavender’s Blue magazine: The Percevals + Temple House Ballymote Sligo — John Lynn attribution and 1864 expansion detail
• Wikipedia: Temple House Manor and Castle