Manderley Castle

Judge Robert Warren built the house in 1840 and called it Victoria Castle, to commemorate Queen Victoria's accession: a castellated mansion in the Victorian manner on the Killiney height above the Irish Sea, with a tunnel running down from the grounds to the beach. Fire gutted the interior in 1928. Sir Thomas Power, of the whiskey distilling family, restored it and gave it a new name — Ayesha Castle, after the immortal queen of H. Rider Haggard's She.

In 1995 the Aylmer family set about turning the castle into a place of tourist interest, converting the stables into a ground-floor apartment and a first-floor craft room; the Stable Gallery opened there, and a number of artists showed work in it. Two years later the musician Enya bought the house for a reported £3 million, outbidding Michael Flatley, who had also viewed it, and renamed it Manderley after the house at the centre of Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca. She said in interviews around 1998 that it had fallen into serious disrepair and needed extensive remodelling. Threats from stalkers led her to fit solid timber entrance gates and to raise the surrounding stone wall to more than 2.7 metres, with railings above some stretches; even so, security was breached twice in the middle of August 2005 while she was at the castle. The tunnel to the sea has been sealed.