Mitchelstown Castle

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Mitchelstown Castle, the former home of the Irish earls of Kingston, was located in the north Cork town of Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, Ireland.

According to Claire Tomalin's biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, the house may have been the third one on the site as she believed that it had been preceded by a medieval structure which fell into ruins. This ruin was eventually passed to the second Earl of Kingston who rebuilt it, incorporating a medieval tower. That house was in turn demolished and replaced by a more modern version by his son, George King, the Third Earl of Kingston.

Mitchelstown castle was claimed to be the largest Gothic house in Ireland. The building was famous amongst the Anglo-Irish for having more windows than Buckingham palace in London, as a result of which the Kingstons were obliged to seal one of the windows.

In 1922, at the height of tensions in the Irish Civil War, Mitchelstown Castle was attacked and burned by Republican forces and some of the surviving contents looted. After the fire the owners, the Earls of Kingston, did not rebuild the castle. The remaining ruin was cleared and the stone salvaged and recycled for road building and to build an extension to the Benedictine Abbey at Mount Melleray in the Knockmealdown Mountains.

In the 1950's, a Milk Drying & Milk Powder plant was constructed on the site where the house had originally stood, generating substantial employment and facilitating the export of local dairy produce around the globe.

[edit] Sources

  • Anthony Lawrence King-Harman. The Kings of King House
  • Janet Todd. Daughters of Ireland: The Rebellious Kingsborough Sisters and the Making of a Modern Nation . Ballantine (2005).
  • Claire Tomalin. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. (1992). This biography of Wollstonecraft, a former governess to the King family in the late 1780s, provides some general information about the house, mainly in footnotes.
  • Bill Power. White Knights, Dark Earls: The Rise and Fall of an Anglo-Irish Dynasty. pub. Collins (2000)