Qualla: Shanbally Castle

Shanbally Castle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 21 March 1960, the Irish government blew up the largest country house John Nash ever designed in Ireland. The explosion could be heard ten miles away. Large quantities of gelignite and cortex - the same materials used in quarry blasting - shattered Shanbally Castle into rubble. Nash, the architect of Buckingham Palace and Regent Street, had built it around 1812 for Cornelius O'Callaghan, 1st Viscount Lismore. It had 28 bedrooms, 8 reception rooms, central heating, telephone, electricity, and 7,000 acres of shooting rights when it was last advertised for rent in 1947. It had hosted a king, a queen, and a princess in 1904. It had been empty since the 1940s. And when the Irish government's Land Commission could not find a buyer - or chose not to find one - they detonated it. The decision remains one of the most controversial cultural losses in modern Irish history.

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Shanbally Castle: John Nash's largest Irish house

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Shanbally was commissioned around 1812 for Cornelius O'Callaghan, 1st Viscount Lismore. The architect chosen was John Nash, then at the peak of his Regency career and about to begin work for the Prince Regent in London. Nash designed Shanbally as a vast neo-Gothic country house o...

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Shanbally Castle: A royal visit in 1904

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 3 May 1904 Lady Beatrice and her husband Lt. Gen. Sir Reginald Pole-Carew, with Lady Constance, hosted Edward VII, Queen Alexandra, and Princess Victoria at Shanbally. The royal party were touring south Munster country houses on a circuit that took them between Shanbally and L...

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Shanbally Castle: Twenty-eight bedrooms, seven thousand acres

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By the 1940s the great houses of Anglo-Irish Ireland were in trouble. Maintenance was unaffordable. Servants were difficult to find. The Land Commission was breaking up estates across the country. In December 1946 Country Life Magazine carried an advertisement for Shanbally: 9 re...

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Shanbally Castle: Lord Sackville and the trees

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For a moment in the late 1950s it looked as if Shanbally might be saved. Edward Charles Sackville-West, the 5th Baron Sackville - London theatre critic, novelist, and a child of the literary Sackville family that owned Knole in Kent - had loved the Clogheen area since boyhood. He...

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Shanbally Castle: Gelignite, March 1960

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The decision came in early 1960. In March, The Nationalist newspaper reported: "A big bang yesterday ended Shanbally Castle, where large quantities of gelignite and cortex shattered the building." The explosion was heard ten miles away. The Irish government issued a statement: "A...

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