Qualla: Lismore Castle

Lismore Castle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nicholas Hilliard, Public domain. Sir Walter Raleigh - the same Raleigh of cloak-on-the-puddle legend and the colony at Roanoke - owned this place. He acquired it in 1589 and sold it in 1602 when he needed money during his imprisonment for treason. The buyer was a Yorkshireman named Richard Boyle, who had landed in Ireland in 1588 with twenty-seven pounds in his pocket and a determination to acquire as much as the kingdom would allow him to acquire. He acquired a great deal. At Lismore he made his principal seat, and on 25 January 1627, in one of its rooms, his fourteenth child was born. The boy was named Robert. He would become Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, the man who gave science Boyle's Law. The castle that produced him still stands above the River Blackwater in County Waterford, mostly the work of a 19th-century duke who fell in love with the place.

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Image: Nicholas Hilliard | Public domain

Lismore Castle: Twelve hundred years above the river

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pam Brophy, CC BY-SA 2.0. Before there was a castle there was an abbey. Saint Carthage founded Lismore Abbey here in the early seventh century, and for hundreds of years it was one of the great schools of early Christian Europe. King Henry II of England stayed at the bishop's residence in 1171. Fourteen y...

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Image: Pam Brophy | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lismore Castle: The first earl of Cork

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Power, CC BY-SA 3.0. Richard Boyle was good at acquisition the way some men are good at music. From his twenty-seven-pound start he assembled one of the largest private fortunes in early-modern Britain and Ireland. He bought Lismore from Raleigh in 1602, made it his seat, and transformed it: gabled r...

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Image: Peter Power | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lismore Castle: The Devonshires arrive

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1753 Lady Charlotte Boyle - heiress of the 4th Earl of Cork and 3rd Earl of Burlington - married the Marquess of Hartington. Two years later he became the 4th Duke of Devonshire and, briefly, Prime Minister of Great Britain. Lismore passed with her into the Cavendish family al...

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Image: Richard Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lismore Castle: Pugin's chimney-piece and the Astaire marriage

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Park, CC BY-SA 2.0. Inside the castle, the ruined chapel of the old Bishop's Palace was transformed into a medieval-style banqueting hall by the Gothic Revival masters: Augustus Pugin, who designed Westminster's interiors, and J. G. Crace of London. The chimney-piece in the hall is a Pugin masterwor...

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Image: Colin Park | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lismore Castle: Adele's room and Adele's birthday

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Haydn.hammerton, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Cavendish family still owns Lismore. The 12th Duke of Devonshire, who succeeded in 2004, lives mainly at Chatsworth, the great Derbyshire house. His son Lord Burlington manages Lismore and lives in an apartment in it. In 2005 he converted the derelict west range into Lismore ...

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Image: Haydn.hammerton | CC BY-SA 4.0