Monthly Archives: March 2025

Two Days to Demolish the Work of Centuries


Rush is a coastal town lying some 15 miles north of central Dublin. Following the Anglo-Norman settlement in the late 12th century, much of the land in this area fell under the control of the Butler family, although the latter’s main base was further south in what are now Counties Kilkenny and Tipperary. As a result, during the medieval period the property was leased to a succession of tenants. In the mid-17th century, the estate was owned by James, the 12th Earl of Ormond and future first Duke of Ormond and according to the Civil Survey of 1654, the property was then occupied by one Robert Walsh. Estimated to extend to 300 acres, and valued at £120, the estate consisted of ‘one Mansion House of stone & one slated house of Office, a Barne & Stable slated, one thatcht Barne two other houses of office thatcht, six tenements, five cabbins part of an old castle Valued by ye Jury at five hundred poundes, a garden plott, one young orchard with some young trees set for ornament, a ruined Chappell of Ease, one horse mill now out of use & one decayed Pigeon House.’ Subsequently, a branch of the Hamilton family held the estate: within the walls of the ruined St. Catherine’s church is a tomb remembering ‘the affable, obliging, exemplary, wise, devout, most charitable, most virtuous and religious, the RT. Hon George Lord Hamilton, Baron of Strabane’ who died there in 1668. However, the Rush property was once more in the possession of the Butlers until 1715 when the second Duke of Ormond’s was attainded after he had fled to France and given his support to the Jacobite cause. The estate was then acquired by Henry Echlin whose great-grandfather Robert Echlin had moved from Scotland to Ireland where he was appointed Bishop of Down and Connor in 1612. A judge and ardent bibliophile, Henry Echlin was created a baronet in 1721 and on his death four years later, the title and estate in Rush passed to his grandson, Sir Robert Echlin. The latter’s wife Elizabeth (née Bellingham) continued the family’s engagement with books, being a writer and friend of Samuel Richardson (she is remembered for having penned an alternative, less shocking, end for Clarissa). Like George Hamilton before him, Sir Robert, who died in 1757, is buried in the now-ruined St Catherine’s church, his tomb reading
‘Here lies a man without pretence,
Blessed with plain reason and common sense,
Calmly he looked on either life and here
Saw nothing to regret or there to fear.
From nature’s temperate feast rose satisfied
Thanked Heaven that he lived, and that he died.’
Readers familiar with the works of Alexander Pope will recognised that the first two lines are a variant of those written by the poet for his On Mrs Corbet, who died of a Cancer in her Breast, while the other four come from Pope’s epitaph to Elijah Fenton. 






Sir Robert Echlin had no direct male heir and so the Rush estate and baronetcy passed to his nephew, Sir Henry Echlin who appears to have been something of a wastrel and who dissipated the greater part of his inheritance before dying suddenly in 1799. Long before then, gambling debts had cost him the Rush estate which in 1780 was bought by his cousin Elizabeth. A daughter of Sir Robert, she had been left a mere shilling by her father who disapproved of what he deemed Elizabeth’s unsuitable marriage to Francis Palmer of Castle Lacken, County Mayo (for more on the Palmers and Castle Lacken, see https://theirishaesthete.com/2022/09/12/castle-lacken). Thus the estate passed into the hands of the Palmers who chose to rename the place Kenure Park (from the Irish Ceann Iubhair, meaning the Headland of the Yew Trees), by which it has been known ever since. Francis and Elizabeth Palmer’s son, Roger, on his death in 1811 bequeathed ‘May Money’ to the area. According to the terms of his will, £2,500 was to be laid out in Ireland ‘in proper securities at 6% p.a. compound interest, and I desire that the interest be employed every succeeding year, in the month of May, for the purpose of giving a marriage gift to ten women. Never married, between the ages of twenty & thirty-two years, at the rate of £10 each.’  Furthermore, ‘They must be from the poorest & born upon any part of my estate in the County of Dublin, but women born in the environs of the town of Rush, within two miles of my estate be preferred.’ Seemingly this fund still exists, although now dormant. Meanwhile, successive generations of Palmers lived on the estate until the death without a direct male heir of Lt. General Sir Roger Palmer, fifth baronet, in 1910. Kenure Park then passed to Colonel Roderick Henry Fenwick-Palmer who retained the property until 1964 when, unable to maintain it any longer, he sold the place to the Irish Land Commission for £75,500. Most of the land was divided between local farmers, with the rest acquired by Dublin County Council for housing and playing fields.





A succession of houses were constructed on what eventually became known as the Kenure estate. The scant remains of what is thought to be a late-medieval tower house lie to the north of the later Palmer residence, and this may have been the ‘Mansion House of stone’ mentioned in the Civil Survey of 1654. In any case, that building was succeeded by another, constructed either during the time of the dukes of Ormond or else soon after the estate came into the hands of the Echlins. A description of this house survives, since it was visited in June 1783 by the antiquary Austin Cooper who noted that ‘About half a mile from the (Roman Catholic) Chapel is Rush House, once the seat of the Echlin family, and which now belongs to a Mr. Palmer. It is a large quadrangular building in the old style, terminated by a hewn parapet ornamented with urns. In the front is a small pediment supported by four Tuscan pillars, which evidently appears to be a modern addition. The situation of it is low, but the view of the sea agreeable. The improvements about it are very neat and kept in good order.’ This late 17th/early 18th century house appears to have remained intact until the outbreak of fire in 1827 but the damage cannot have been too serious since photographs show both the bow-ended drawing room and the room above it had elaborate rococo ceilings in the style of Robert West. In 1842-44 extensive work was carried out on the building to the designs of George Papworth, the exterior refaced in stucco in the manner of a Nash London terrace and a tremendous pedimented Corinthian portico of granite added to the facade. Inside, the entrance hall was given engaged Doric columns and walls covered in yellow scagliola. Beyond this rose a top-lit Imperial staircase with ornate wrought-iron scrolled balustrading, further Doric columns on the ground floor and Ionic pilasters above. All  survived until 1964 when the house was sold and a four-day auction held to dispose of the contents, which realised a total of some £250,000. Contemporary reports noted that a pair of Buhl cabinets went for just £120, while a Chinese Chippendale display cabinet, sold to a London dealer, made £6,800, seemingly the highest price yet paid for a single piece of furniture at auction in Ireland. Today these figures seem absurdly low. To give a couple of examples: in June 2008, that same Chinese Chippendale cabinet was sold at auction by Christie’s for more than £2.7 million. And in October 2006, two mid-18th century chairs attributed to the London cabinet makers William and Richard Gomm and once part of a set of five in Kenure Park, sold for US$408,000.  Meanwhile, an undignified fate awaited the house itself, which was left standing empty by the county council, subject to the inevitable decay and equally inevitable assault by vandals who eventually managed to set fire to the place. Finally, after 14 years of neglect, the authority sought tenders for Kenure Park’s demolition, although after local petitioning, Papworth’s great portico was left standing, a melancholic reminder of what had been lost. As a headline in the Irish Times noted in September 1978, it took ‘Two Days to Demolish the Work of Centuries…’

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A Prize for Bravery


August 2015

March 2018

April 2023

Regular readers of this site may remember that five years ago, the Irish Aesthete established an annual prize for owners of historic houses here, kindly sponsored by the O’Flynn Group and organised in conjunction with Historic Houses of Ireland (HHI). This year’s recipients of the prize are the owners of Dromdiah, County Cork, about which more can be read here: The Age of Austerity « The Irish Aesthete.
When first visited almost a decade ago, the house was a roofless shell, smothered with vegetation both inside and out, and widely regarded as beyond salvation. Not long afterwards it was bought and since then has undergone a painstaking restoration that now nears completion (the owners hope to move into the building later this year). The work at Dromdiah shows that no property is beyond salvation and once again demonstrates a new wave of interest in bringing Ireland’s historic houses back to life. As such it is a very worthy recipient of the 2025 HHI-O’Fynn Group Heritage Prize.







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A Cabinet of Curiosities


Cabinets of Curiosity have probably always existed, albeit in different forms. In a seminal work on the subject published in 1908, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance (later translated as Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance), Viennese art historian Julius von Schlosser argued that Greek and Roman temples acted as proto-cabinets of curiosity, a role then taken on by medieval churches with their valuable holdings of vessels, vestments and reliquaries, often masterpieces of craftsmanship incorporating precious metal and gemstones.
As we now understand the term, cabinets of curiosity were first created in the late 15th and 16th centuries, around the same time that Western European horizons – geographic, religious, scientific, metaphysical – began to expand. New worlds, new ideas: they recast the way in which people thought of themselves and their surroundings. The Renaissance cabinet of curiosities was frequently filled with rare and priceless treasures. But unlike collections held in earlier ages by temples or churches, these ones belonged to individuals. And while they were the forerunners of the modern museum, initially they existed not in the public realm, but in private ownership and were thus accessible only to the privileged few. Because their contents were costly, they were almost exclusively the preserve of princes and members of the aristocracy, representative of that caste’s wealth and power. Cabinets could vary in size from a single piece of furniture – a cabinet – with drawers holding different articles, to a room or even series of rooms specifically designed to display the owner’s collection.






By the mid-16th century, similar collections had begun to appear north of the Alps and to develop into the kunstkammer (room of art), a term apparently first employed by Count Froben Christoph of Zimmern in his historical account Zimmerische Chronik of 1564–66. Alternatively, they might be called Wunderkammer (room of wonder). Whatever the name, they featured a broad range of objects, including Artificialia (products of man) and Naturalia (products of nature), with some pieces being a hybrid combination of both. A cup owned by the Emperor Rudolf II in the early 17th century, for example, was made from an elaborately carved horn of a rhinoceros, on top of which sat a silver-gilt lid in the form of a grimacing monster, a fossilized shark’s tongue coming out of its mouth and a pair of African warthog tusks serving as its horns. Scientific instruments, clocks and automaton might also feature in the typical kunstkammer. Priceless works of art were placed alongside strange items brought from distant lands on one of the newly opened global trade routes, pieces from the distant past were displayed next to the newest objets de vertu. They were united in their diversity, their beauty and their singularity. In many instances, they were small but wondrously formed, a display of the craftsman’s ingenuity, incorporating rare materials such as crystal, ivory and amber, together with gold and silver and gemstones.
Collectors would acquire valuable antiquities, including sculptures, mosaics, cameos, medals and coins. They commissioned paintings from leading artists and sought out bizarre and curious pieces. Isabella d’Este was the proud owner of a unicorn’s horn, while in 17th century Vienna the Emperor Ferdinand III possessed a bowl (or chalice) said to have come from Solomon’s Temple as well as horn which had belonged to the Magi. Other collectors came to own mermaids’ skeletons or taxidermized creatures that were part bird, part beast. Brought together, these diverse items reflected the era’s budding curiosity and insatiable thirst for better comprehension of what was then a rapidly changing world. Collections were simultaneously intended to delight the eye and to encourage closer study of nature in all her forms. In 1565 Samuel Quiccheberg, scientific and artistic adviser to Albrecht V of Bavaria, published Inscriptiones vel tituli theatre amplissimi, the first treatise on collecting in which he described the cabinet of curiosity as being ‘a theatre of the broadest scope, containing authentic materials and precise reproductions of the whole of the universe.’
While some of the largest and most famous Kunstkammern were formed by the likes of the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague Castle or the Archduke Ferdinand II in Schloss Ambras outside Innsbruck, members of the emerging European bourgeoisie also began to form their own collections. In 1599 the Neapolitan apothecary Ferrante Imperato published Dell’Historia Naturale, which included an engraving depicting his own cabinet of curiosities then on display in the city’s Palazzo Gravina. The picture shows the extraordinary objects gathered by Imperato in one room, said to have numbered as many as 35,000 plant, mineral and animal specimens, including shells, marine creatures and even a crocodile suspended from the ceiling.





Great collections continued to be formed over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, perhaps none greater than belonging to Sir Hans Sloane. Born in 1660 in Killyleagh, County Down, even as a child Sloane collected plants, shells, bird eggs and other objects of natural history which he carefully catalogued. At the age of 19 he left Ireland and moved to London to study chemistry and then medicine. After some years travelling elsewhere in Europe, Sloane spent time in Jamaica and the Caribbean (where he is sometimes credited with inventing milk chocolate). Back in London and married to an heiress, he became a successful physician, appointed President of the College of Physicians in 1719. He also continued collecting, so that by the time of his death at the age of 92 in 1753 he had amassed some 71,000 objects, many of them acquired from other collectors – notably James Petiver and William Charleton – and housed in a property he owned in Chelsea, London (where he is still recalled through the names of such locations as Sloane Square and Hans Crescent). In his will, Sloane bequeathed the entire collection to the nation, on condition of payment of £20,000 to his heirs, and that Parliament create a new and freely accessible public museum to house it. The funds were raised through a national lottery and in June 1753, an Act of Parliament established the British Museum, where much of Sloane’s collection remains to the present day.
Sir Hans Sloane was by no means the only Irish creator of a cabinet of curiosities. Also in the 18th century, Dr Richard Pococke, a Church of Ireland clergyman who in 1756 became Bishop of Ossory, developed his own remarkable collection, perhaps inspired by those he had seen when travelling through Europe as a young man. Writing from Berlin to his mother in October 1736, he described visiting ‘the Chambers of Sciences & Curiosities in the Palace, where are very rich Cabinets & great curiosities, natural & artificial…an Egg with a Crocodiles head just out of it no bigger than a Goose Egg, a trunk of a tree with the horns of a deer run thro it & part of the head let into it, which I believe was done by art, the tree standing & appears plainly to have grown after it being much bigger where the horns run in than in any other part, stones natural mix’d with gold, &c.’ Pococke later travelled to the Middle East and while there acquired objects, including ancient Egyptian mummies, bringing them back to Ireland where they were installed in the Bishop’s Palace in Kilkenny. Visitors to the episcopal residence could see the mummies alongside antique Greek and Roman coins and medals, as well as urns, fossils and shells, and in the garden several basalt stones that Pococke had carried off from the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim.
Incorporating items collected by Charles Cobbe, Archbishop of Dublin, the cabinet of curiosities at Newbridge, County Dublin was essentially the creation of his son Thomas and daughter-in-law Lady Betty Cobbe who lived there from the time of their marriage in 1755 to their respective deaths in the early 19th century. Originally referred to as ‘ye Ark’, the cabinet filled an entire room in Newbridge, its walls lined with hand-painted sheets depicting oriental scenes and held in place by faux bamboo découpage trellising. A suite of specially made cases and display cabinets were filled with a typically diverse range of items, shells, exotica, curios, much of it from other countries. In 1758, for example, the Cobbes bought some coral, as well as a nest of vipers and a ‘Solar Microscope.’  Eventually, the collection came to include a stuffed crocodile, an ostrich egg mounted in a bog oak stand, a set of ivory chess pieces from China and a depiction of the coronation of George III (1761) carved in bone and placed inside a glass bottle.
Over time, the room in Newbridge began to suffer neglect: even by 1858 it was being described as ‘the poor old museum.’ In the 1960s the paper on the walls was taken down and sold, the cases and cabinets moved first to the basement and then an attic lumber room, and the space converted into a sitting room. More recently, Newbridge’s cabinet of curiosities has been recreated, a replica of the wallpaper produced from memory by a member of the family, Alec Cobbe, the cases brought down from the attic, and a replica sample of the collection once more on display. It offers an opportunity to see how cabinets of curiosity, in all their quirky, whimsical idiosyncrasy, would have looked when they were more widespread.

Kunstkammer: An Idiosyncratic Cabinet of Curiosities runs at Lismore Castle Arts, County Waterford until October 26th 2025. 

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Erected for their Posterity



Above the pointed arch doorway with cable moulding at the entrance to a now-roofless church in Naul, County Dublin is a plaque stating that the building had been ‘Erected by Hon. Edward Hussey and his wife Lady Mabel (nee Barnwall) for their posterity in the year of Our Lord God 1710.’ This memorial also features the Hussey coat of arms and motto ‘Cor Immobile’ (Immovable Hearts). The plaque suggests the building dates from the early 18th century but more likely it was reconstructed then as a chantry chapel for the Husseys (whose vault lies within the nave), because the Civil Survey of 1654-6 described it as being ruinous with only ‘the walles of ye parish church’ still standing. In addition, at the east end there remains a fine double ogee-headed window (a second, less ornamented opening can be found on the south wall). At the start of the 19th century, a Church of Ireland church was constructed to the immediate north of this little structure but was then demolished in 1949 due to insufficient numbers attending services there.



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Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona duit*

Abbey Leix, County Laois

Ballyvolane, County Cork

Lodge Park, County Kildare

Oakfield Park, County Donegal

Malahide Castle, County Dublin

In 1959, following a visit to Ireland, Johnny Cash wrote a song called ‘Forty Shades of Green.’ Given that this is St Patrick’s Day, it seems appropriate to offer readers of the Irish Aesthete a small selection of those shades…

Killruddery, County Wicklow

Garinish Island, County Cork

Blarney Castle, County Cork

Farmleigh, Dublin

Kells Bay, County Kerry

*Translation to English: Happy St Patrick’s Day
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A Most Singular Act of Architectural Vandalism



After last month’s post about the Museum Building in Trinity College Dublin (see A Remarkable Building « The Irish Aesthete), here is another property designed by the same architectural team of Deane & Woodward. Dating from 1859-61, the former Kildare Street Club replaced a number of other buildings on the same site. The club was founded in 1782, when William Burton Conyngham (1733–96), having been blackballed by Daly’s Club in Dame Street, established a rival organisation at 6 Kildare Street. By the middle of the following century, and although the club had taken on adjacent premises, the members felt the need for further expansion and therefore commissioned Deane & Woodward to come up with an entirely fresh scheme. Unlike the typical London clubhouse, which was inclined to be designed in the style of a classical Italianate palazzo, the Kildare Street Club is more Italo-Byzantine in manner, the red brick facade relieved by large window openings and abundant use of grey and white stone. The grand interior had a double-height staircase hall, and equally capacious reception rooms, as well as a racquet court with dressing rooms, smaller games rooms and, in the attic storey, members’ bedrooms. 



In what Professor Christine Casey has rightly described as ‘the most singular act of architectural vandalism in recent Dublin history’ (although this title could be keenly contested), the interior of the Kildare Street Club was ruthlessly gutted in 1971, after its members had moved out of the premises prior to joining forces with another club. Thereafter a development company applied to convert the building into offices, and received permission from the local authority to do so. While certain features remain in situ, such as some of the chimneypieces and cornicing, the rooms today bear little resemblance to their original state. The exterior, on the other hand, still looks much as it always did, and includes a series of densely carved columnar capitals and bases, the work here attributed to the Cork-born O’Shea brothers, as well as Charles Harrison and Charles William Purdy: one of the bases famously represents a number of monkeys engaged in a game of billiards. Today the former club houses both the Alliance française and the manuscripts department of the National Library of Ireland.



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Glimpses into the Past


Barely a mile to the north of Castle Carra, County Mayo (see last Monday, Difficult to Locate without a Guide « The Irish Aesthete) can be another substantial ruin, this time of a religious settlement. Like the castle, Burriscarra Abbey, as it is now popularly known,  is believed to have been established by the Anglo-Norman Adam de Staunton. He granted the land here to the mendicant Carmelite order, founded by St Berthold in 1154. The date given for the establishment of the house at Burriscarra is 1298, just over a quarter century after the first Carmelite friary had been founded in Leighlinbridge, County Carlow. At Burriscarra, the friars did not remain in situ for long. For reasons unknown – perhaps warfare, perhaps devastation caused by the Black Death – by 1383 they had gone, after which the property lay abandoned for some 30 years. 





In 1413, the former Carmelite friary at Burriscarra was given to the Augustinian order which had already established a house elsewhere in the county at Ballinrobe (see Unclear Past, Unclear Future « The Irish Aesthete). The Augustinians appear to have been invited by Edmund and Richard Staunton, descendants of Adam de Staunton. On arrival, the friars found the place in a poor state of repair, these circumstances made worse in 1430 when the buildings were burned, presumably during one of the internecine disputes that bedevilled Ireland throughout the 15th century. In consequence, a Papal indulgence was granted to anyone who visited the church and gave alms for its repair.  After the rebuilding of the friary a dispute arose between the Carmelites and the Augustinians over ownership of the property. However, it appears the Augustinians remained in residence of the friary until, like all other religious houses, it was suppressed in the 16th century. In 1607 the lands of Burriscarra were granted by James I to one John King, who then sold them on to the Bowens, after which, like nearby Castle Carra, they passed into the possession of the Lynch family and eventually being taken into the care of the Office of Public Works. 





Today Burriscarra friary consists of a roofless church with a side aisle on its south-west side and the remains of a two-storey domestic range incorporating a cloister garth to the immediate north. Much of what survives likely dates from the rebuilding of the property in the 15th century, following damage caused by the fire of 1430. Access to the church is through a small round arched window at the west end. At the head of the building, what was once a very substantial east window occupying much of the gable wall was later blocked up and a much smaller opening created. The southern wall had another three large windows and while these remain, all their tracery is lost. Below these, in what would have been the choir, are a sedilia and piscina. The former is demarcated by a trefoil arch concluding on either side with a carved head, one of which has suffered considerable damage. Note also how the decoration of column capitals inside the arch differ from each other and that the ogee-headed window inside the arch is slightly off-centre, as also is the point of the adjacent piscina’s arch. The only window to retain its tracery can be found inside the side aisle, accessed via two large arched openings on the south wall nave. Like nearby Castle Carra and the subsequent 18th century house, what survives of this religious establishment offers us glimpses into the complexities of this country’s history.

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A Peculiar Melancholy Air



As previously mentioned, George Moore’s 1886 series of essays Parnell and his Island describes a duck shoot that brings him and another man to the ruins of Castle Carra, County Mayo. After leaving that building, the pair walk on an come across ‘the ruins of what is almost a modern house; there is a vast courtyard, and in the centre a colossal stone fox, and farther away is the ruin of a great gateway, and on the hill stand colossal foxhounds.’ This was what remained of a residence built probably at the start of the 18th century by Sir Henry Lynch and then abandoned by his son Robert. There was an earlier mention of the same property in 1836 when the Rev. Richard Butler of Trim and his wife Harriet (née Edgeworth) together with Harriet’s sister Maria and step-mother Frances came to stay with George Moore’s grandparents at Moore Hall, located to the south east of Castle Carra. The went to see the latter site which ‘had that peculiar melancholy air of modern decay belonging to houses which have been abandoned within the memory of man, and on passing through it to the grounds beyond, the party were startled at seeing immense busts on pedestals still standing in the long grass, the remains of former decorations. Ben Johnson, Congreve and some other of the later dramatists of Charles II’s time, were here, presenting a strange grotesque appearance, stained and weather-beaten in this wild and remote corner of the world.’ Since the time of the Butlers, and indeed of George Moore, the busts, as well as the colossal stone fox and hounds, have long disappeared, and the remains disintegrated much further, so that it is even more challenging to imagine how this great house and its surroundings once appeared. The best surviving remnants are the two immense stone gateposts, rising some 17 or 18 feet high. The ‘peculiar melancholy air’ observed by Harriet Butler also continues to hang over the place.



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Difficult to Locate without a Guide


In Parnell and His Island, originally published as a series of articles in Le Figaro in 1886, George Moore recalls an early morning duck shooting expedition on Lough Carra, County Mayo. He and his companion set off in the dark across the wind-tossed lake in a water-logged boat, landing before the remains of Castle Carra. Moore describes how, to escape the bitterly cold wind, the two men decide to take shelter in the building. ‘Dacre says he’ll be able to find the way, and after much scratching amid the bushes, and one cruel fall on the rocks, we reach some grass-grown steps and climb through an aperture into what was once probably the great hall. A high gable shows black and massy against the sky, and tall grass and weeds grow about our feet, and farther away the arching has fallen and forms a sort of pathway to the vault beneath. Centuries of ivy are on walls, and their surfaces are broken by wide fissures, vague and undistinguishable in the shadow and cold gloom. But as the moon brightens I see, some fifteen feet above me, a staircase – a secret staircase ascending through the enormous thickness of the walls. What were these strange ways used for? Who were they who trod them centuries ago? Slender women in clinging and trailing garments, bearded chieftains, their iron heels clanging; and as I evoke the past, rich fancies come to me, and the nostalgia of those distant days, strong days that were better and happier than ours, comes upon me swiftly, as a bitter poison pulsing in blood and brain; and regardless of my friend’s counsels, I climb towards the strange stairway, as I would pass backwards out of this fitful and febrile age to one bigger and healthier and simpler…’ 





Sited on a small peninsula on the eastern shores of Lough Carra, the castle here was built by the Anglo-Norman Adam de Staunton in the late 13th century. His descendants remained in possession of the property for the next 300 years, mixing with other local families and hibernising their surname to MacEvilly. In 1574 the castle’s owner was Moyler or Miles M’Evilly, but some time later the building and surrounding lands were acquired by Captain William Bowen, his possession confirmed by deed of feoffment dated November 1591 and made to him by Peter Barnewall, Baron Trimleston. How the latter came to have a claim on the place is unclear.  Following Captain Bowen’s death without an heir in 1594, Carra Castle passed into the ownership of his elder brother Robert Bowen who lived in County Laois. He in turn gave it to his younger son Oliver Bowen, who occupied the castle until the outbreak of the Confederate Wars in 1641 when he fled to Wales, dying there without issue in 1654. After the restoration of Charles II in 1660, Castle Carra was granted to Sir Henry Lynch, third Baronet, a member of the well-known Galway family. His grandson, Sir Henry Lynch (fifth baronet) took up residence in the area, building a new residence close to the old castle which was then abandoned. A series of formal terraces led from this house down to the lakeshore. However, following Sir Henry’s death in 1764, his heir Robert Lynch moved to another property in County Mayo, originally called Moate but then renamed Athavallie near the town of Balla; today this building is a community school. Sir Robert had married Jane Barker, granddaughter and heiress of Tobias Blosse of Little Bolsted, Suffolk and assumed the additional surname of Blosse, the family thereafter being known as Lynch-Blosse. Meanwhile, both the old castle and the more recently constructed house at Carra were abandoned, the latter building being described as ‘almost in ruins’ in a report on the estate prepared by civil engineer and land surveyor Samuel Nicholson in 1844. 





The core of Castle Carra dates from the time of Adam de Staunton in the late 13th century, although several alterations were subsequently made to the building. Measuring some 45 by 25 feet internally, and of three storeys with its entrance on the first floor of the south side, the roofless castle is an example of the mediaeval chamber-tower which typically comprised a rectangular block with large open spaces on the first-floor level. Later additions to the site include a plinth, bawn and gateway, these probably dating from the 15th century. Long neglected and in a relatively remote spot, an Irish Tourist Association survey undertaken in the early 1940s describes the castle as ‘difficult to locate without a guide’, and that remains the case to the present day. 


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