Qualla: Kinnitty Castle

Kinnitty Castle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777 at English Wikipedia, Public domain. There is a thirty-foot stone pyramid in the graveyard of St. Finnian's Church in Kinnitty, County Offaly. It is the family mausoleum of the Bernards, who lived in the castle nearby through the nineteenth century. Captain Richard Bernard, who fought in the Crimean War and was much loved by Augusta Magan, is buried inside it. So are several other Bernards. The Egyptian Revival style was fashionable in the 1830s among aristocratic landlords who wanted something more permanent than the family vault. The pyramid has now outlasted both the family and the castle they built it for - though the castle itself is still standing, having been burned, rebuilt, sold, repurposed, foreclosed on, and bought again across two centuries of Irish change.

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Image: Sarah777 at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Kinnitty Castle: Eight Hundred Years of Sieges

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Digital Eye, CC BY-SA 4.0. The first castle at Kinnitty was destroyed in 1209, less than forty years after the Normans had arrived in Ireland. The Normans rebuilt it in 1213 and stayed. Around the same time, the Augustinian Abbey of St. Finnian was established alongside the castle, and the Kinnitty High Cr...

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Image: Digital Eye | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kinnitty Castle: The House That James Pain Built

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1811, Lady Catherine Hutchinson, wife of Thomas Bernard, commissioned the architect James Pain to extend the existing house into a full Tudor-revival gothic castle. Pain - a London-trained pupil of John Nash - had already built dozens of churches and country houses across Irel...

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Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kinnitty Castle: Burned and Rebuilt

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777 at English Wikipedia, Public domain. In 1922, during the Irish Civil War, the Irish Republican Army burned Castle Bernard. It was one of dozens of Big Houses destroyed in those years - symbolic targets, the visible architecture of British landlord power. The Bernards survived; the house did not. After Irish independ...

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Image: Sarah777 at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Kinnitty Castle: A Wedding Castle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niall Kearney, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Ryan family of Limerick bought the castle in 1994 and converted it into a four-star hotel, with thirty-seven bedrooms, a dungeon bar, and an event space configured for weddings. The Slieve Blooms above the building, the lawns running down to the woods, the gothic-revival silh...

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Image: Niall Kearney | CC BY-SA 4.0