Glenveagh Castle

John George Adair (1823-1885) was a native of County Laois and a member of the minor gentry who made his fortune by chancy land speculation in the United States. He returned to Ireland and bought up vast tracts of land in Donegal, purchasing Glenveagh and Gartan in 1859 to make an estate of 28,000 acres. The glen's Irish name, Gleann Bheatha, means the glen of the birch trees.

In 1869 he married Cornelia Wadsworth Ritchie, a daughter of James S. Wadsworth, a Union general in the American Civil War, and together the couple set about the creation of the gardens and the castle.

Adair's troubles with his tenants began almost immediately. A row over shooting rights and trespassing sheep culminated in the murder of his Scottish steward, James Murrog, and Adair then carried out his threat to evict the tenancy. On 3 April 1861 a considerable cortege of 200 police, three sub-officers, the resident magistrate and the sub-sheriff set out from Letterkenny to do the work. It began at Lough Barra, where a widow, Mrs Hanna McAward, her six daughters and her son were the first to suffer, and continued for three days through Magerashangan, Staghall, Claggan, Ardator and Castletown among other townlands. Forty-four families were put out of their blackhouses, 244 people in all. The clearance was not made for financial gain, but to improve the aesthetic aspect seen from the castle.

Many of the evicted went to the workhouse in Letterkenny; others were helped by locals, and the clergy raised money for them. In Australia the Donegal Relief Fund was revitalised and arrangements made to help young people between the ages of 16 and 28 to emigrate, and many took the offer. They settled in Sydney, where a strong oral tradition kept their families' bitter memories alive among the descendants. All of this fell on the heels of the Great Famine and of emigration on a par with the Highland Clearances. Adair's name as a Donegal landlord has passed into history and folklore, ballad and documentary, and all of them agree on one thing: that he was notoriously cruel.

Adair built Glenveagh Castle between 1867 and 1873, a four-storey rectangular keep in the Scottish baronial style with a garden about it. His ambition was to create an estate and castle that surpassed Balmoral, Queen Victoria's Scottish retreat. It is said that a curse was laid on the castle because of the cruel evictions, so that none of its later owners would have heirs to carry on the family name.

Adair died in 1885 and his widow Cornelia (1837-1921) took over the ownership. She lived part of the time at Glenveagh, and unlike her husband she was popular, improved the beauty of the grounds and was considerate of the townspeople. The Duke and Duchess of Connaught were her guests in September 1902. The Adairs left no children.

Arthur Kingsley Porter, a professor at Harvard University with an international reputation, bought Glenveagh Castle and the surrounding property from the Adair estate in 1929. He and his wife Lucy used it as a second home, hung his significant art collection there and entertained guests, and Porter also built a fishing cottage on Inishbofin Island. He disappeared mysteriously from that area on 8 July 1933.

Lucy Porter sold the castle and its properties to Henry Plumer McIlhenny of Philadelphia, a friend and former student of her husband's at Harvard. McIlhenny had rented Glenveagh for the summer months since 1933 and bought the estate outright in 1938. In the 1970s he left the gardens and the castle to the Irish nation so that Glenveagh National Park could be created, though he went on using the castle as a part-time residence until 1982.