Qualla: Westport House

Westport House: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ap jen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Grace O'Malley, the Pirate Queen of Connacht, had a castle on the south shore of Clew Bay called Cahernamart, the Fort of the Beeves. She used it as a base for her raiding fleet in the sixteenth century, ruled the surrounding territory of Umhaill, and was buried somewhere on Clare Island when she died around 1603. Sixty-five years later, her great-great-great-granddaughter Maud Bourke married an Anglo-Irish Catholic lawyer named John Browne, and the couple's son built a new house on the foundations of the old castle. That house, expanded and rebuilt across three centuries, is Westport House. The descendants of Ireland's most famous independent chieftain ended up as the Marquesses of Sligo, governors of Jamaica, owners of enslaved people on Caribbean plantations, and eventually the abolitionists who freed them. All of it traces back through one family living in one building looking out over Grace O'Malley's bay.

Read more: Westport House on Qualla

Image: Ap jen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Westport House: From Pirate Queen to Marquess

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LAS30a, CC BY-SA 4.0. Colonel John Browne built the first Westport House around 1670. He was Catholic and Jacobite, supplying cannonballs from his iron mines to King James II's army in the Williamite Wars. The Catholic side lost at Aughrim and Limerick in 1691, and Browne lost most of his estate in th...

Read more: Westport House on Qualla

Image: LAS30a | CC BY-SA 4.0

Westport House: Howe Browne in Newgate Prison

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brholden, Public domain. Howe Peter Browne, the 2nd Marquess of Sligo, inherited Westport House in 1809 at twenty-one. He was a friend of Lord Byron and the Prince Regent, a member of the most reckless generation of Regency aristocracy, and obsessed with classical antiquity. On a tour of Greece, he excav...

Read more: Westport House on Qualla

Image: Brholden | Public domain

Westport House: Sligoville

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. In 1834, Howe Browne was appointed Governor of Jamaica. The Slavery Abolition Act had just passed, but the law replaced outright slavery with a transitional 'apprenticeship system' that kept the same people working the same plantations under almost the same conditions. Sligo was ...

Read more: Westport House on Qualla

Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Westport House: George and the Famine

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joseph Mischyshyn, CC BY-SA 2.0. When Howe Browne died in 1845, his son George inherited Westport House and almost simultaneously, the Great Famine. The west of Ireland was hit hardest. Westport quay became the funnel through which George imported cargoes of meal for the starving tenants on his estate. He spent ...

Read more: Westport House on Qualla

Image: Joseph Mischyshyn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Westport House: The Sale

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ArséniureDeGallium, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Brownes owned Westport House for almost three hundred years. The 11th Marquess, Jeremy Browne, died in 2014 and left the estate to his five daughters by means of private legislation passed by the Seanad in 1993, bypassing his cousin Sebastian who inherited the title but nothi...

Read more: Westport House on Qualla

Image: ArséniureDeGallium | CC BY-SA 3.0