Hag’s Castle, also known as Tullokyne Castle, stands in a quiet area near Moycullen in County Galway, its broken walls almost lost among trees and farmland. Local tradition insists that the site once held two small castles side by side, home to two sisters described in folklore as “hags,” not in the modern sense of insult, but as older women associated with charms, bitterness and old beliefs. According to the story, the sisters despised one another to such an extent that one eventually caused the death of the other. Left alone, the surviving sister is said to have been driven mad by isolation and, unable to bear the silence of the abandoned towers, took her own life. Even in death, the feud supposedly continued. Villagers claimed the sisters could not be buried together, and that strange disturbances followed any attempt to lay them side by side. This tension became part of the site’s reputation: two spirits bound to a ruined landscape, forever unsettled.

Only a single ruin remains today, but its setting carries an unsettling stillness. On quiet evenings the castle seems cut off from the modern world, and visitors sometimes remark on an odd atmosphere, as if the past sits uncomfortably close to the present. Whether the legends contain any truth is impossible to know, but the story has endured for generations, and the solitary ruin, standing where two once rose, gives the tradition a melancholy weight.