Guest post by Clare Dyckhoff from GapYearEscape
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
When you’re traveling around a new place, you often have a set list of things you want to see, explore, visit and experience. I regularly do this, and so I was the same when I went traveling around Ireland with my family. However while I was thinking of the various sights I wanted to see, the places I wanted to visit and the people I was interested in meeting, I never dreamed that I would be visiting a castle in Ireland and reading my family name in a text book labelling my ancestor as a ‘previous owner’. That certainly was not one of the criteria on my ‘to do’ list, but it certainly made the trip interesting to say the very least.
Bunratty Castle, or translated as “Castle at the Mouth of the Ratty” from its Irish roots, is located in County Clare. Flicking through the textbook on the history of the Castle, it was only when my Dad alerted me to the fact that the name ‘Thomas Studdert’ was in the textbook and was in fact my Gran’s Uncle, when I learned that he had owned the castle back in the 18th Century before The Studderts eventually abandoned it in 1804.
