Qualla: Killarney House

Killarney House: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Queen Victoria, on her 1861 visit to Ireland, stood on a hillside above Lough Leane and decided this was where the Earls of Kenmare ought to build their new house. Eleven years later they did - or tried to. The Elizabethan-Revival mansion that rose at her chosen site cost over £100,000 and was considered one of the finest in Ireland. It burned in 1879, the year after it was finished. Rebuilt. Burned again in August 1913. This time it was not rebuilt. The story of Killarney House is not really the story of a single building - it is the story of three different houses that have carried the same name, on roughly the same hillside above Lough Leane, since the Earls of Kenmare first put their imprint on this corner of Kerry.

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Killarney House: Queen Victoria's Hillside

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Earls of Kenmare - descendants of Sir Valentine Browne, who had received Killarney lands during the Tudor plantations - had lived at Kenmare House since 1726. By the 1860s the house was felt to be too modest for the family's status. When Queen Victoria visited Ireland in 1861...

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Killarney House: Imitating Longleat

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lady Kenmare - Gertrude Thynne, granddaughter of the 2nd Marquess of Bath - is said to have driven the project. Her grandfather's seat was Longleat in Wiltshire, the great Elizabethan house, and she wanted Killarney House to evoke it. The result was a red-brick Jacobethan mansion...

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Killarney House: The American Contractor

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1956 Mrs Beatrice Grosvenor - niece of the 7th Earl of Kenmare and granddaughter of the Duke of Westminster - built Knockreer House on the site of the burned Killarney House. Her cousin Francis Pollen designed it. Mrs Grosvenor later donated Knockreer House and its surrounding...

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Killarney House: Reopened in 2016

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

John McShain died in 1989. Mary lived in the house another nine years, until her death in 1998. With both McShains gone, the house and its remaining acres reverted to the Irish State. Then it stood empty. For more than a decade Killarney House was a closed building in a public pa...

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