Qualla: Mitchelstown Castle https://qualla.com/mitchelstown-castle en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:12 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/6/1/mitchelstown-castle-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Mitchelstown Castle https://qualla.com/mitchelstown-castle Mitchelstown Castle: Introduction https://qualla.com/mitchelstown-castle/ Photo credit John Preston Neale, Public domain. On 12 August 1922, on the orders of a local republican leader whose father and grandfather had been middlemen on the Kingston estate, the biggest neo-Gothic house in Ireland was set alight. Sixty principal bedrooms. A 100-foot gallery. A dining room that could seat 100 guests. Three libraries. Paintings by Gainsborough and Beechey. The whole vast pile - which had cost a hundred thousand pounds to build in 1823 and become "the fashion statement of its time" - went up in flames at Mitchelstown, County Cork. When the fire stopped, what remained was an ascendancy ruin and a hard question: what to do with all that beautiful cut limestone. The answer came in 1925. Steam lorries, two consignments a day for at least five years, carried Mitchelstown Castle's stones twenty-eight miles east to the Knockmealdown foothills, where Cistercian monks rebuilt them as Mount Melleray Abbey.

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Image: John Preston Neale | Public domain

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/6/1/mitchelstown-castle-wp/gc61-mitchelstown-castle-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Mitchelstown Castle: From White Knights to Earls of Kingston https://qualla.com/mitchelstown-castle/ Photo credit John Preston Neale, Public domain. The first castle here was raised in the 15th century by the White Knights of Mitchelstown, a Hiberno-Norman family who held this corner of north Cork. Through marriage it passed to the Kings, who became Barons and eventually Earls of Kingston. James, the 4th Baron, modernised the...

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Image: John Preston Neale | Public domain

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/6/1/mitchelstown-castle-wp/gc61-mitchelstown-castle-from-white-knights-to-earls-of-kingston.mp3 0:06 2 full Mitchelstown Castle: A hundred thousand pounds https://qualla.com/mitchelstown-castle/ Photo credit John Preston Neale, Public domain. In 1823 George, the 3rd Earl of Kingston, decided the Palladian house was not grand enough. He pulled it down and commissioned the architects James and George Richard Pain to build him something extraordinary. The new Mitchelstown Castle had sixty principal bedrooms and twenty mi...

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Image: John Preston Neale | Public domain

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/6/1/mitchelstown-castle-wp/gc61-mitchelstown-castle-a-hundred-thousand-pounds.mp3 0:06 3 full Mitchelstown Castle: A guest list of the famous https://qualla.com/mitchelstown-castle/ Photo credit John Preston Neale, Public domain. Even in its slow decline, the castle drew remarkable visitors. George Bernard Shaw came to stay. So did Arthur Young, the great agricultural writer. Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish novelist, walked these rooms and would later make Bowen's Court at Farahy, a few miles away, the s...

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Image: John Preston Neale | Public domain

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/6/1/mitchelstown-castle-wp/gc61-mitchelstown-castle-a-guest-list-of-the-famous.mp3 0:06 4 full Mitchelstown Castle: 12 August 1922 https://qualla.com/mitchelstown-castle/ Photo credit John Preston Neale, Public domain. In June 1922, with the Irish Civil War about to begin, the IRA occupied the castle. The then-owner William Downes Webber, his relatives, and his servants were evicted to King Square in the town. For weeks the building was held by republicans seemingly preparing for siege. In earl...

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Image: John Preston Neale | Public domain

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/6/1/mitchelstown-castle-wp/gc61-mitchelstown-castle-12-august-1922.mp3 0:06 5 full Mitchelstown Castle: Stones that became an abbey https://qualla.com/mitchelstown-castle/ Photo credit John Preston Neale, Public domain. The site of the castle is now a milk processing factory owned by Dairygold Co-op. There is no ruin to visit; the dairy levelled what was left. But the stones survive elsewhere. In 1925 the family dismantled the burned shell and sold the cut limestone to the Cistercian monks of Mo...

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Image: John Preston Neale | Public domain

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/6/1/mitchelstown-castle-wp/gc61-mitchelstown-castle-stones-that-became-an-abbey.mp3 0:06 6 full