O’Brien’s Tower

In 1835, Cornelius O’Brien, descendant of High King Brian Boru and MP for Clare, did something radical for a landlord: he built a tower atop cliffs that rise to 700 feet, reportedly furnished as a round-tabled teahouse, to lure 19th-century tourists, convinced their spending would lift his tenants from poverty. The gambit worked so well that locals quipped he ‘built everything around here except the Cliffs.’ O’Brien also constructed a school, a bridge, and flagstone walls (one allegedly won through a wager to build a fence ‘six foot high and one inch thick’), and even provided a piper to entertain visitors.

The tower is technically a folly, and alongside it O’Brien built a holding wall, pathways, a picnic table on the cliff edge, and stables for visitors, with Liscannor flagstone central to the work. A bridge over the Inagh River followed in 1836, easing the route between Lahinch and Liscannor, and a school for tenants’ children arrived in the 1840s. When famine struck, he joined the Liscannor relief committee. A Doric column in his honor was reportedly paid for by compulsory subscriptions from those same tenants. After his death in 1857 the tower slid into ruin, and in the 1960s Clare County Council bought the site for £1,060, prompted by a German industrialist’s offer on the surrounding land; restoration came in 1974. The cliffs now draw around 1.5 million visits a year, and since 2022 the tower has also held barrels of JJ Corry whiskey, left to mature in the Atlantic air. Tea, it seems, was only ever the opening offer.