Tag Archives: Crom Castle

Intra Muros


A gate giving access to the walled garden on Inisherk Island, part of the estate at Crom Castle, County Fermanagh. This dates from the 1830s, when the present house was built for the Crichton family. The artist and landscape designer William Sawrey Gilpin laid out the demesne here during this period, so presumably he was responsible for the walled garden also. Running to some three acres, one side – that facing south as customary – was devoted to heated green houses where exotic fruits like peaches and pineapples were grown.


At the centre of the garden stood a palm house that rose 30 feet; it has gone, but the remains of the lily pond that once occupied the centre of the building still remains (albeit bereft of lilies, or even water). The walls on all sides are of brick (more often they are of stone, except on the south side where brick was used because it better retained heat) and have undergone some repair. The best surviving feature are the handsome wrought-iron gates survive on the north and east sides of the garden.

Summer in Winter


Seen from the bridge across Upper Lough Erne to Inisherk Island, this is the hexagonal summer house at Crom Castle, County Fermanagh. According to an 1830s Ordnance Survey map, it stands on the site of an older schoolhouse, but that in turn may have been adapted from an 18th century building, the two-storey hexagonal building designed by Sir Edward Lovett Pearce ‘For Mr Creighton to be built on a Sunk Island in Lough Hern’, of which an undated drawing survives. In its present incarnation, the summer house dates from the second half of the 19th century.

Romantic Views


The ruins of old Crom Castle, County Fermanagh. Located on the shore of Upper Lough Erne, this was built in 1610 by Scottish settler Michael Balfour: nine years later it was described by Nicholas Pynnar as ‘a house set of lime and stone’ situated inside ‘a bawn of lime and stone being 60 feet square, 12 feet high with two flankers.’ In 1655 Crom was acquired by the Crichton family who lived here until 1764 when the building was gutted by fire. Following the construction of the present Crom Castle elsewhere on the estate in the 1830s, this ruin was embellished by the addition of long walls concluding in circular flankers on either side of the main block. During the following decade the Crichton Tower, a folly on little Gad Island (seen below) was likewise built as a romantic eye-catcher.

Playing to the Gallery


The extraordinary first-floor gallery at Crom Castle, County Fermanagh. Designed by Edward Blore, the present house dates from the mid-1830s to replace an earlier castle destroyed by fire: ironically sections of this one suffered the same fate soon after completion and had to be reconstructed. The core of the castle is given over to an inner hall that features a bifurcating staircase composed of wood and plaster and in late-Perpendicular style. It rises to the generous gallery screened by a run of arches at either end, the whole lit by an immense octagonal roof lantern.

A Light Touch

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The double return Imperial staircase in Crom Castle, County Fermanagh. The house was designed in the mid-1830s by Edward Blore, a protégé of Sir Walter Scott who specialised in Gothic Revival architecture. Here a mixture of timber and plaster was employed to create a feather-light sequence of soaring arcades in the late Perpendicular style leading up to an octagonal lantern.

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