A Sadder Sight than One would Think



‘It was a sadder sight than one would think,
To see that ruined church upon the hill,
Deserted, dreary, lone and desolate;
But then its spire would point to heaven still.
Like standard-bearer wounded in the fight,
Who, with his last remaining strength, upholds
His nation’s banner; so this dying church,
In its last hours, seemed bent on saving souls.

‘Twas sad to see the windows broken through;
But then they let God’s air and sunshine in:
The church, once closed to keep all errors out,
Now seemed as if it prayed more light to win.
And early spring-birds entered fearless there,
Within the church-pale unconverted came,
And built their nests within the pulpit’s shade,
And never dreamed there could be any blame…’





‘I wondered if the ancient fathers slept
In peace, within the churchyard just away,
While this, their pride, their consecrated dome,
So all unheeded crumbled to decay;
And more, if creeds escape while churches fall,
If they’ve no broken doors and windows, too,
By time’s or progress’ hand,—through which the light
Of higher truths comes brightly streaming through.

I climbed with fear the staircase weak and old,
That tottered like a ship by tempest driven,
And wondered if the saints had feared as much,
When through its creed they groped their way to heaven;
And stood within the galleries that ran
From end to end, and bent and gazed below
With heart that trembled like the saints of old,
Lest all should crumble, and I “sink to woe.”…’





‘And, as I gazed, and thought how sad that now
No feet of worshippers its old aisles trod,—
Alike forsaken by its builder, man,
And him to whom they gave, its owner, God;
I heard the voice of children in their mirth,
A group of little faces gathered there,
All unbaptized, some fresh from God’s own hand,
Who played and sported where they knelt in prayer.

I lingered till the human angels passed,—
Until the sun was growing faint and dim,
When, soft and sweet, amid the, stillness there,
The birds—Heaven’s choir—began their vesper hymn;
And while I listened to their “Te Deum,”
That made the ruin with its echo ring,
I said, “Not half so sweet the anthems loud,
That many souls in dim cathedrals sing!”‘



Extracts from The Ruined Church by Achsa Sprague (published posthumously, 1864)
Photographs show the ruins of Coolaghflags church, County Kilkenny, a late mediaeval chapel which was enlarged c.1750.

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Spot the Difference


A little detail likely missed by most of the car drivers and pedestrians hurrying past the Garda Station at the junction of Pearse and College Streets. The Scottish Baronial building dates from 1915 when constructed by Office of Public Works architects as a new central barracks for the Dublin Metropolitan Police. It has two entrances, one triple arched for rank-and-file constables, the other a single wide porch for Inspectors. The difference between the two is amusingly indicated by the carved stone figurative stops on either side of the doorways.


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A Reawakening


Regular visitors to this site will know that the Irish Aesthete is always delighted to learn of an historic property undergoing restoration, especially when this work is being tackled by private owners who intend to make the property a family home. Such is the case with the building seen here today: Knockelly Castle, County Tipperary. They have written a brief but helpful account of the site, which is reproduced below.  




‘Knockelly is reputed to have been built by Edmund Fitz James Butler, 8th Baron Dunboyne for his second son Piers, with work commencing in c.1465. The castle remained within various lines of the Butler family until 1592, when Peter Oge Butler rebelled against the crown, and Knockelly was granted to Patrick Grant, a nominee of the 10th Earl of Ormond. By 1602, Knockelly was the property of Sir John Everard (d.1624), who was most likely responsible for the c1610 renovations. Everard was admitted to the Inner Temple in London in 1578, called to the bar in 1590, but returned to Ireland and had been made Justice of the Liberty of Tipperary by 1601.
Knockelly was retained within Everard lines until Sir Redmond Everard, 4th Baronet, supported the failed Jacobite rising of 1715 and had to flee to France where he lived out his days. During Sir Redmond’s exile, funds were short and Knockelly was occupied by a series of notable tenants, including the Jolly’s, the Lowes and the O’Callaghans, until the castle and entire Everard patrimony, was acquired by Thomas Barton, a powerful wine merchant, in c.1751.
The Barton estate included Grove, an important house and lands to the south, and Knockelly may have served as an agent’s house for the estate. It is believed the 1830 renovations to the Gatehouse may have happened then. Knockelly was eventually let to James Kickham, one of whose daughters, Catherine, married a Patrick Heffernan. The Bartons, whose estate had been reduced from 5,000 to 500 acres, sold Knockelly between 1904-1906 to the Heffernans, who lived there until the present owners purchased the property in 2020.’




Across more than 550 years, Knockelly has served a variety of roles ranging from a magnate’s stronghold to a land agent’s residence and, prior to its present owners taking possession, a very substantial farmyard. But over that long period of time, it has been in the custodianship of just five families and perhaps this helps to explain why so much of the original structures have survived, not least the great tower house which last underwent remodelling in 1610. This stands within an expansive bawn which was built in 1560, the still-intact walls incorporating gun turrets, bartizans and, on the south side, a gatetower. The last of these began as a simple two storey building through which access was gained to the interior of the enclosure. Over time this was enlarged and embellished, most recently in 1830, and turned into a house but evidence of its earliest function can still be found inside along with other tantalising hints of the house’s gradual evolution. Indeed, as the owners note, ‘the diverse range of buildings, built in different centuries, from different fabric and designed for different functions’, means that Knockelly offers a rare insight into social and architectural changes through the centuries in Ireland since the late Middle Ages.




When the present owners bought Knockelly Castle six years ago, the majority of buildings on the site were in a semi-ruinous condition, as is the case in so many other locations throughout Ireland. And, without intervention since the property’s purchase, it is most likely that further and perhaps irreversible deterioration would have taken place. Thankfully that has not been the case and instead since 2022 a programme of gradual restoration has been underway, not least with the gatetower house which is now a family home. Work is slow, dependent on funds being available, and using materials and techniques which are most sensitive and appropriate to the structures. Employing primarily stone, wood and lime, and engaging with craftspeople trained in traditional skills, Knockelly is reawakening and being brought back to full use. As the owners emphasise, ‘there are no quick fixes. We work for the long-term.’ Benefitting from their own knowledge and that of the workers with whom they engage, they now run a number of onsite traditional building skills workshops so that anyone else interested in undertaking a similar project can benefit from their experience. Knockelly Castle was the deserved recipient of the 2026 Historic Houses of Ireland Heritage Award 2026, sponsored by Castleacre Insurance. 


For more information about the workshops run at Knockelly Castle, please see: Knockelly Conservation Workshops — Knockelly Castle

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Through the Gate




After Monday’s post showing the wonderfully restored walled garden at Glenarm Castle, County Antrim, here is the Barbican Gate. Located on the far side of a bridge leading into the village, the building dates from 1825 when designed by Sir William Morrison to accompany the transformation of the main house from a classical residence into a Tudoresque fantasy for his client, Anne Katherine Mac Donnell, Countess of Antrim. Like a miniature castle, the Barbican is replete with turrets, towers and battlements and over the main entrance can be seen a sandstone coat of arms which was originally on the facade of Glenarm Castle and records its construction by Randle Mac Sorley Mac Donnell, first Earl of Antrim and his wife Alice O’Neill. The Barbican Gate has been restored by the Irish Landmark Trust and is now available to rent for short stays. 




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Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?


Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;




Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;




But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
Photographs of the walled garden at Glenarm Castle, County Antrim

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A Memorial



The remains of a late medieval church at Templecross, County Westmeath. The building was once part of the adjacent Tristernagh Abbey estate, granted by Elizabeth I to the soldier William Piers as a reward for his efforts to clear the Scots from Ulster. Tristernagh was then inherited by his son Henry, who despite marrying a daughter of Thomas Jones, Archbishop of Dublin, seemingly converted to Roman Catholicism in his late 20s. The south wall of the church features a large stone memorial tablet to Henry Piers who died in 1623 (although the tablet itself carries the date 1620). 



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A Ducal Birthplace


There has sometimes been confusion over the likely birthplace in Dublin of the Hon Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, since the location was given as Antrim House. The property known by this name stood at the junction of north Merrion Square and Lower Mount Street, a vast residence erected for the Earl of Antrim, often considered the most impressive such property in the area after Leinster House: although vacated after just a couple of decades by the Antrims and later turned into an hotel, it survived until 1938 when demolished to make way for an expansion of the National Maternity Hospital. More importantly, the house was only built in 1775, six years after Wellesley’s birth. The confusion arises because the aforementioned earl had previously been responsible for the construction of a previous house not far away on Merrion Street, and this building had been leased by the Earl of Mornington, Arthur Wellesley’s father, in 1765, meaning it might still be thought of in some quarters as Antrim House.





Garret Wellesley – created first Earl of Mornington in 1760 – was born in 1735 in his family seat in County Meath, the now-ruinous Dangan, which has featured here before (see Once One of the Grandest Places in Meath « The Irish Aesthete). From an early age, he demonstrated both interest and aptitude in music, with a particular facility for the violin and for composition: when he was aged 13, his godmother, Mary Delany, wrote that he was ‘a most extraordinary boy. . . [with] more knowledge than I ever met with in one so young.’ Seemingly when he asked composers Francesco Geminiani and Thomas Roseingrave for lessons, they both said he already knew everything they could teach him. So passionate was he about music that on the day of his wedding in February 1759 he also conducted a charity performance of Handel’s oratorio Acis and Galatea for Mercer’s Hospital. After receiving an MA in 1757, along with two other amateur composers, Kane O’Hara and Francis Hutcheson, Wellesley founded an Academy of Music in Dublin. Combining concerts with charitable fundraising, this was the first musical institution in Britain and Ireland to admit women members, its patrons including the Countesses of Tyrone, Charleville and Mornington. Lady Freke, Miss Cavendish and Miss Nichols were listed as harpsichord players, and there were five aristocratic female vocal performers. In 1764 Trinity College Dublin conferred Lord Mornington with a Doctor of Music before being appointed Professor of Music there later that year. He held this post for the next decade and when he resigned, the professorship lapsed and was only revived in the following century. Lord Mornington’s compositions are almost all vocal, including a five-act opera, Caractacus, which was performed at The Theatre Royal, Smock Alley in Dublin in 1764. Seemingly only one completely instrumental work by him survives, a march he wrote for the installation of the Duke of Bedford as Chancellor of Dublin University in 1768. This then was the man who was responsible for Mornington House.




Now part of the Merrion Hotel, Mornington House was not the earl’s first Dublin residence: he had previously occupied a property on Grafton Street. But with the move east following the completion of Leinster House in … he decided to find a new home for himself and his family. Initially, he intended to acquire a plot 100 feet wide on Merrion Square itself, the proposed house being flanked by a carriage arch on either side. However, Lord FitzWilliam, who owned the land here, turned down this scheme, hence Mornington opted to move around the corner and take the lease on Lord Antrim’s recently completed Merrion Street house. As seen today, the building is of five bays and three storeys over basement, faced in brick like its neighbours and with a pedimented stone doorcase flanked by Doric columns; it is thought to have been designed by architect Christopher Myers (he had previously been the architect of Lord Mornington’s Grafton Street house). Again, as is so often the case with Dublin townhouses, the plain exterior conceals a rich interior decorative scheme, although the entrance hall is largely unornamented. On the other hand, two reception rooms to the right of this have elaborate plasterwork ceilings are heavily ornamented with scallop shells, floral festoons and acanthus scrolls, as well as flower baskets and birds. While much in the style of Robert West, Professor Christine Casey attributes all this to the Dublin stuccodore James Byrne, who was similarly responsible around the same period for the decoration of 12 Merrion Square, where his client was William Brownlow, MP for Lurgan, Co. Armagh, who was a friend of Mornington and, like him, a keen amateur musician (he was reputed to have played the harpsichord at the first performance of Handel’s Messiah in Fishamble Street, Dublin in 1742). In May 1766 Brownlow paid a gratuity of £7-13s-6d to Byrne as a ‘present for doing his work well’. Back on Merrion Street, the most interesting space is the stair hall, lit by a large round headed window on the return. In contrast to the somewhat mean joinery of the stairs and dado rail, the plasterwork is most engaging, the wall panels containing garlands and festoons of fruit and flowers, while above them is an exceptionally deep coved cornice with a double row of ovals composed of scrolling acanthus leaves with flowers at their intersections. This was the house in which the future Duke of Wellington spent at least part of his childhood.


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Different Fates



The former Royal Irish Constabulary barracks in Mullinahone, County Tipperary dates from c.1850 and was variously occupied by that organisation, then the Black and Tans during the War of Independence before becoming the local Garda station. However, like many other such premises in small towns, it closed down some decades ago and then stood empty until bought in 2014 when work began turning the building into a private residence. While the interior was gutted, relatively little else was done before the property came back on the market four years ago. A recent planning application by an Irish cosmetics company proposes turning the old barracks into a manufacturing hub for its products. No such luck for another building on the opposite side of the street. This is said initially to have served as a watermill before housing militia and cavalry during the 1798 Rebellion. It was then used as a courthouse until 1922, while the rear of the property acted as a local butter market and communal hall. Despite being described by the National Built Heritage Service as ‘a building of considerable historic resonance in the county’ it has been allowed to fall into the present sad state and two years ago was placed on the local authority’s Derelict Sites register. .



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Making No Sense


In Ireland, there were a number of landed families with the surname Browne, not all of whom were related to each other. There were, for example, the Brownes who eventually became Earls of Kenmare and lived in County Kerry. Then there were the Brownes, Barons Oranmore and Browne, based in Castle MacGarrett, County Mayo. And in the same county were another family of Brownes, who became Marquesses of Sligo and lived in Westport. They were descended from one John Browne, a cartographer who came to Ireland in the 16th century and held the office of Sheriff of Mayo after preparing a map of the county. He was killed in February 1589 during an encounter at Burrishoole at the start of an uprising by the native Irish but by then had already acquired land in an area of the country known as the Neale (believed to derive from the Irish An Éill, meaning a strip of land). Here his descendants would live for the next few centuries, building a substantial house in the 1730s, of which only the shell of one wing now survives, the rest having been demolished some 200 years later in 1939. But evidence of the Brownes’ presence survives elsewhere around the former estate. 




Three strange structures can be found within the old Browne demesne at the Neale, the best-known being the Pyramid, a dry-stone construction – like the surrounding field boundaries – dating from c.1765 and comprising nine steps that climb to a height of 30 feet from a base more than 40 feet wide. The Pyramid is believed to have been commissioned by Sir John Browne, first Lord Kilmaine, to commemorate his elder brother George who died in 1765. On the rise of the fourth step is a cut-stone plaque in Latin, praising the deceased who is described as ‘best beloved’ and a man whose arms  ‘were formerly the great glory and protection of his country.’ Reputed to have been designed by Sir John’s brother-in-law, the first Earl of Charlemont (who had travelled to Egypt some years before while on his Grand Tour), the pyramid’s pinnacle was seemingly once crowned with a lead statue of Apollo.





Refurbished by the Office of Public Works in 1990, the Pyramid is in better condition than the other two follies erected by the Brownes on their estate at the Neale. A short distance to the south can be found an hexagonal temple. It consists of six plain Doric columns supporting an entablature with carved cornice and frieze. Likely once roofed, the temple stands on a high hexagonal stone base which can be entered from the rear. Inside this, a series of vaults spring from the outer walls to a central hexagonal arrangement of piers, which support the columns of the structure above. Frequently, the lower portion of such buildings was used by servants, where they could prepare tea and other refreshments for the owners who sat in the space above admiring the parkland around them. Unfortunately, little is known about the date or designer of the building, but it may have been constructed in the 1770s when the first Lord Kilmaine was engaged in landscaping this part of the estate.
And finally, a little to the west and in woodland on the periphery of the former demesne can be found a very odd structure known as the Gods of the Neale. Set within a tiered rusticated structure (and surrounded by fragrant wild garlic when the Irish Aesthete recently visited) are carvings of three mythical figures, a griffin, a unicorn and an angel. Below them, a large tablet bearing the date 1753 carries a complex text that claims that the figures were found in a cave nearby and that they were the ancient Gods of the Neale, ‘or the Gods of Felicity.’ It’s all rather absurd, but that’s an important characteristic of follies: they don’t have to make sense. This is certainly true of the three surviving examples in the Neale, which means they are all the more precious. 


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Wilful Waste



Following Monday’s entry on St Loman’s Hospital in Mullingar, County Westmeath, nothing better exemplifies the Health Service Executive’s indifference to the condition of historic buildings supposedly under its care than the state of the property’s gatelodge. This charming little property, adjacent to a road leading into the centre of the town, dates from the last quarter of the 19th century and was soon after extended in a style ‘similar to a Swiss cottage’ to provide a residence for the institution’s head male attendant. When surveyed for buildingsofireland.ie in 2004 it was in decent condition and used as an office. Since then, instead of being refurbished and providing much needed accommodation, it has been allowed to fall into dereliction.



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