Lough Rynn Castle

The Lough Rynn estate is built on the ancestral lands of Clan Maelsechlainn-Oge Mac Raghnaill, the pre-Conquest rulers of this part of County Leitrim known as Muintir Eolais. The Annals of Loch Cé and the Annals of Connacht record "the crannóg of Claenloch" (Lough Rynn) as early as 1247, and the Mac Raghnaill's own castle, whose ruins stand close to the lake shore some 500 metres from the present house, is mentioned in 1474. The historian Fiona Slevin has called its design fairly standard for the period but notes two unusual features: rounded corners on an otherwise square plan, making it more resistant to artillery, and a straight stairway cut into the thickness of a wall rather than the usual corner spiral.

In the Nine Years' War the Mac Raghnaill allied with Aodh Mór Ó Néill against the English conquest of Ireland. Under the Plantation of 1621 their lands at Lough Rynn were confiscated and granted to an English family, the Croftons, who brought Protestant settlers and, through the 1620s and 1630s, gradually removed the native Irish from the land.

In 1750 the Croftons were replaced by another English family, the Clements, whose forebear Daniel Clements had served as an officer in Oliver Cromwell's army and been granted land in County Cavan confiscated after the Cromwellian conquest. That year Nathaniel Clements acquired the Lough Rynn estate while keeping his Cavan lands, and the family grew into county political life: Robert Clements became sheriff of Leitrim in 1759 and, in 1795, the first Earl of Leitrim. In 1833 Robert Bermingham, Viscount Clements, son of the second Earl, built a mock Tudor revival house overlooking Lough Rynn — the building underlying today's Lough Rynn Castle. On his death in 1839 management of the estate passed to his brother, William Sydney Clements.

When his father, Nathaniel Clements, 2nd Earl of Leitrim, died in 1854, William Sydney Clements became the 3rd Earl, inheriting some 90,000 acres across four counties. He ran the estate in an authoritarian style that alienated tenants, and the inability of many to pay rent during and after the Great Famine gave him an opening to clear land and impose more productive farming. In 1858 he assembled a thousand armed troops and police to repossess Gortletteragh Church over unpaid rent his own father had waived; some six thousand men from Leitrim and neighbouring counties turned out to defend it, forcing him to back down. The Nation newspaper called him "already famous for such proceedings towards his tenantry as not many even of his own order dare imitate." By 1860 he had turned firmly against land reform, and in 1870 he spoke out against Gladstone's first Irish Land Act as an attack on property rights.

Hatred of Lord Leitrim grew through the 1860s alongside stories of his treatment of local women; in September 1860 James Murphy of Mohill fired a pistol at him after challenging him to a duel, and a further attempt on his life followed later in the decade. In Donegal in particular he was the object of deep resentment and had to travel under armed military escort; there, in 1878, he carried out a wholesale eviction of his tenants, many of them starving in the famine that hit north-west Ireland in 1878–79. On 2 April 1878 three men, Michael Heraghty, Michael McElwee and Neil Sheils, ambushed and killed him at Cratlagh Wood near Milford. The killing was widely publicised as evidence for land reform, his Dublin funeral was marked by rioting, and none of his three assassins was convicted.

The estate passed not to the heir presumptive but to Sydney Clements's English-educated cousin, Colonel Henry Theophilus Clements, who carried out an extensive expansion completed in 1889: a new wing and a Baronial Hall designed by Thomas Drew, with heavy plaster cornices, an ornate inglenook fireplace and oak wainscoting, bringing the house to fourteen bedrooms and four bathrooms.

By 1952, when Marcus Clements inherited, most of the estate had been sold to former tenants under the land acts, and he lived there until the 1970s, after which the house stood largely empty. It was bought in 1990 by Irish-American investor Michael Flaherty and in 2001 by the Hanly family, whose ownership restored the house and gardens; Lough Rynn Castle opened as a hotel in September 2006.