Qualla: Castle Gurteen de la Poer

Castle Gurteen de la Poer: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Irishtree, CC BY-SA 4.0. Marilyn Manson and Dita Von Teese were married in a private non-denominational ceremony in the great hall on a December afternoon in 2005. That sentence alone tells you something is unusual about Castle Gurteen de la Poer. The Elizabethan Revival pile rises in a long sweep of turrets and battlements on the south bank of the River Suir, eight kilometres east of Clonmel, with the Comeragh Mountains making a slow grey horizon behind. It was built in the 1860s by a Catholic Anglo-Norman count who needed somewhere big enough to express six hundred years of dynastic history. A century later it became the studio of one of the most unsettling living painters in Europe.

Image: Irishtree | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castle Gurteen de la Poer: An Anglo-Norman House

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0. The de la Poers - sometimes anglicised as Power, sometimes as le Poer - arrived in Ireland with the Anglo-Norman invasion of the 12th century. They settled in Waterford and stayed for the next eight hundred years. Their refusal to leave Catholicism behind in the Protestant 17th c...

Image: A.-K. D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castle Gurteen de la Poer: Roberts and Burn

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Lawrence, Public domain. The architect was Samuel Ussher Roberts, great-grandson of John Roberts, the 18th-century Waterford designer of Christ Church Cathedral. Construction began in 1863 and finished in 1866. The design owes a lot to the Scottish architect William Burn, whose Tudor-Baronial mansions ha...

Image: Thomas Lawrence | Public domain

Castle Gurteen de la Poer: St. Hubert's Stag

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Irishtree, CC BY-SA 4.0. The dining room is the heart of the house, kept in Victorian Baronial style. Faded red walls rise above a dado of brown oak panelling. A carved oak chimney piece carries heraldic angels holding the family arms, and above them sits the family crest: St. Hubert's Stag, antlers and ...

Image: Irishtree | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castle Gurteen de la Poer: The Helnwein Years

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Irishtree, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1998 the Austrian-Irish painter Gottfried Helnwein bought Castle Gurteen and began a long restoration. Helnwein is best known for huge photo-realist paintings of wounded children, masked figures, and bandaged faces - work that has made him one of the most exhibited contemporar...

Image: Irishtree | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castle Gurteen de la Poer: Behind the Gates

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Irishtree, CC BY-SA 4.0. Gurteen is private; the public does not get in. From the road between Clonmel and Carrick-on-Suir, the castle is visible through trees in winter and almost vanishes in summer leaf. The river path - the Suir Blueway - runs along the opposite bank, and walkers can sometimes glimpse...

Image: Irishtree | CC BY-SA 4.0