Castle Oliver

The lands where Castle Oliver stands were settled in about 1658 by Captain Robert Oliver, one of Oliver Cromwell's soldiers. The present house replaced an earlier Castle Oliver that stood a thousand yards to the south-west, the birthplace of Eliza Oliver, mother of the notorious Lola Montez, who became the lover and favourite of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. For many years the place was known instead as Clonodfoy, a contraction of an earlier Irish name, Cloch an Otbhaidhigh, meaning the stone structure of Otway, Otway being an Anglo-Norman family name.

Captain Oliver's descendant Richard Oliver married a Yorkshire heiress, through whom he inherited substantial wealth and property in West Yorkshire, and moved away to live at Parlington Hall near Leeds, leaving Castle Oliver to deteriorate in the hands of a bailiff. His daughters, Mary Isabella and Elizabeth Oliver Gascoigne, both married members of the Trench family of Woodlawn, County Galway; the younger, Elizabeth, married Frederic Mason Trench, 2nd Baron Ashtown, in 1852.

Mary Isabella and Elizabeth commissioned the present castle in 1845. The York architect George Fowler Jones designed it in the Scottish Baronial style and built it in a local pink sandstone quarried on the estate; he had already handled several substantial commissions for the sisters in the north of England, including almshouses and churches. It was built for entertaining rather than for defence, with a ballroom, drawing room, library, morning room, dining room and hall under hand-painted ceilings, and it was set on massive terraces commanding much of the 20,000-acre estate. Its wine cellar, said to hold some 55,000 bottles, is the largest in Ireland.

The sisters were accomplished artisans in their own right, and designed and executed both the stained glass and the verre eglomise panels that ornamented the ballroom fireplace; much of that work has survived. Mary Isabella was a highly skilled wood-turner who published, under a male pseudonym, an authoritative book on the craft, The Art of Wood-Turning, still a respected source on the subject. She and her husband made their home at Parlington Hall, the Gascoigne seat in Yorkshire, while Elizabeth and Lord Ashtown occupied Castle Oliver; the house was later inherited by Elizabeth's step-grandson, the Honourable William Cosby Trench.

Mrs Lynn Trench, the last of the family to live at Castle Oliver, sold the property to the racing driver Billy Coleman in 1978. It changed hands several times afterwards and became the property of a local bank, which broke up the remaining land, farm and lodges into separate lots; the castle itself failed to find a buyer and languished into decay, falling prey to vandals and thieves. It appeared in the Irish Georgian Society's book Vanishing Houses of Ireland.

Damian Haughton bought it in 1988 and, on the account of the owner who followed him, put a halt to most of the worst leaks in the roof. Nicholas Browne bought it in 1998 and continued the restoration work, transforming it back into a habitable residence. Declan and Emma Cormack of County Antrim bought it in 2006 and completed high-grade restoration of many original rooms and features, among them the library, the St Patrick's stained glass window, the wooden panelling, cornices and many fireplaces, and made it their family home before buying another castle in County Antrim a few years later. From May to September 2014 Castle Oliver was opened to the public for house tours in conjunction with Limerick City of Culture, and in 2015 the Cormacks sold it to the Ralph family from Australia, who took it as a home for "several months of the year".