The Townsends of Castletownshend

Richard Beamish married Mary Townsend of Clonakilty, bringing in the family of Colonel Richard Townsend (1618–1692) (my 8× great-grandfather). He was a parliamentarian officer who distinguished himself at Lyme Regis, commanded at Knocknanuss (1647), sat as MP for Baltimore, and settled at Castletownshend, where his descendants remain. Recall that Sir Robert Travers (Chapter 3) fell at that same battle.

The Colonel's wife (my 8× great-grandmother) was Hildegardis Hyde, of a Wiltshire family long claimed, too flatteringly, for the royal Hydes of Clarendon; I untangle that pleasant confusion under The Stuart queens. It was their daughter Mary Townsend who carried the name into my own line, by her marriage to Richard Beamish of Mount Beamish in 1695.

It is worth pausing on what "settled at Castletownshend" means, for the place still carries his name. About 1665, Colonel Richard Townsend built himself a fortified house on the harbour at Castlehaven, and the village, one steep street running down to the water, Castletownshend grew up around it. He was no absentee landowner: he held the place for the rest of his long life, and as late as 1690, two years before he died, he beat off a siege of five hundred men at his own door. The family he planted there stayed for three hundred years, marrying endlessly with their neighbours, until Castletownshend became one of the most storied corners of Anglo-Irish life. This was the village where the cousins Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, "Somerville and Ross" of The Irish R.M., lived, wrote, and lie buried. The colonel who fought at Knocknanuss in 1647 had, in the house he raised by the sea, founded a literary village.