Qualla: Cabra Castle

Cabra Castle: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colette Gemmell, CC BY-SA 4.0. Around 1810, the Foster family decided to build themselves a grand new country house outside Kingscourt in County Cavan. They commissioned a building in mixed neo-Norman and Gothick style, with battlemented towers outside and pointed-arch interiors inside. They called it Cormey Castle, after the local townland. It nearly ruined them. By 1813, before they had really finished moving in, the Fosters were so broke that they sold the whole thing to their wealthier neighbours across the road, the Pratts. The Pratts moved in, eventually renamed the place Cabra Castle, and held it for the next 151 years. The Fosters' folly is now a four-star hotel.

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Image: Colette Gemmell | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cabra Castle: Two Houses Called Cabra

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joseph Mischyshyn, CC BY-SA 2.0. The name confuses people. Cabra is a townland just north of Kingscourt, and there have been two different country houses associated with it. The earlier was Cabra House, sometimes called Cabra Castle, which the Pratt family had built on the Cabra Estate after acquiring the land i...

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Image: Joseph Mischyshyn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cabra Castle: Neo-Norman with a Gothick Inside

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Liam Hughes, CC BY 2.0. Architecturally, what stands today is an early example of the Gothic Revival in Ireland, built before the more austere mid-Victorian neo-Gothic of churches and railway stations. The exterior is heavy neo-Norman - battlemented towers, round-arched doorways, the visual vocabulary o...

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Image: Liam Hughes | CC BY 2.0

Cabra Castle: The Pratt Dynasty

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joseph Mischyshyn, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Pratts had owned the Cabra Estate since 1699 and were one of the major Anglo-Irish gentry families of Cavan. Colonel Joseph Pratt absorbed the new Cormey Castle and much of the Foster lands into his own holdings in 1813. Five generations of Pratts lived here. Major Mervyn Pra...

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Image: Joseph Mischyshyn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cabra Castle: The Brennans and the Sheikh

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joseph Mischyshyn, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Brennan family did what many Irish families did with their newly-acquired big houses: they turned it into a hotel. Cabra Castle opened to guests in the late 1960s, and for nearly twenty years the Brennans ran it. In 1986 they sold to a Mr Mansour - a senior politician and bus...

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Image: Joseph Mischyshyn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cabra Castle: Dun a Ri

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joseph Mischyshyn, CC BY-SA 2.0. The original Pratt house - the older Cabra House - is now a ruin in Dun a Ri Forest Park, just across the R179 from the hotel. Dun a Ri means king's fort, after a nearby Iron Age earthwork. The forest park is one of the prettier walks in Ulster, with a wishing well, a fairy glen,...

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Image: Joseph Mischyshyn | CC BY-SA 2.0