The Earl of Dunraven commissioned the manor house in 1832 in the Gothic Revival style that the nineteenth century’s most ambitious Irish aristocracy used to signal their architectural seriousness — the limestone turrets, the carved stonework, the vaulted galleries and the baronial hall whose dimensions were calibrated to receive a household of considerable scale. The…
Ashford Castle’s oldest section dates to 1228 — the de Burgo family’s fortification of the Lough Corrib’s southern shoreline in the first generation of the Norman presence in Connacht, in the understanding that this specific point on the largest lake in the Irish Republic commanded the water approach from the west and the land approach…
Ballyfin stood empty for fifty years. The Regency mansion that Richard Morrison built for the Coote family between 1820 and 1826 — the finest Regency house in Ireland, in the considered assessment of the architectural historians who have been making this assessment since the Irish Georgian Society identified the building in the 1980s as one…