The sadly dilapidated farmyard at Garbally Court, County Galway. The main house and yards were built by Richard Le Poer Trench, second Earl of Clancarty around 1819: thanks to his diplomatic skills at the Congress of Vienna a few years earlier, he had also been created Marquess of Heusden in the peerage of The Netherlands. Lord Clancarty’s architect for Garbally was the London-based Thomas Cundy senior: this was his only significant Irish commission. The Le Poer Trenches remained here until 1922 when the estate was sold to the Roman Catholic diocese of Clonfert for £6,750. Ever since then it has served as a boy’s secondary school.
Tag Archives: Garbally
One of a Kind
Looking not unlike a gigantic lemon squeezer: a hollow octagonal limestone obelisk with angled ribs and graduated elliptical piercings to faces. It stands in the grounds of Garbally, County Galway, an estate formerly belonging to the Trenches, Earls of Clancarty. It is sometimes proposed that the obelisk was originally the spire of St John’s Church at nearby Kilclooney after that building was damaged by fire. However an inscription on the base advises ‘This spire finished in December 1811 was erected from a design presented gratuitously by J. T. Grove Esq. Architect of the British Post Office and Board of Works to Richard Earl of Clancarty’. John Groves was an English architect and although he produced designs for a couple of other projects in Ireland, this is his only extant work here making it very much one of a kind. Garbally remained in the hands of the Trench family until the last century: since the 1920s it has been a school.