Mitchelstown Castle

A castle stood at Mitchelstown, in north County Cork, from the 15th century, built by the White Knights of Mitchelstown and passed by marriage to the King family, Barons and later Earls of Kingston. James, 4th Baron Kingston, refurbished and modernised it in the 1730s. After his death in 1761 it went to his granddaughter Caroline Fitzgerald, who married her cousin Robert King, Viscount Kingsborough, from 1797 the 2nd Earl of Kingston. In the 1770s the Kingsboroughs pulled down most of the old castle and folded what was left into a new Palladian mansion, described as a 'house with wings'.

The Kingsboroughs employed the young Mary Wollstonecraft as governess to their three children. One of them, Margaret King, later Countess Mount Cashell, was the dedicatee of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem A Sensitive Plant. The family also produced the Viscount Kingsborough who wrote Antiquities of Mexico.

In 1823, after succeeding, their son George, 3rd Earl of Kingston, demolished the Palladian house and commissioned a new castle from James and George Richard Pain. It held 60 principal and 20 minor bedrooms, a gallery 100 feet long, three libraries, a morning room and a dining room that could seat 100 guests at one sitting.

It was the biggest neo-Gothic house in Ireland, cost £100,000 to build and became the 'fashion statement' of its time, inspiring other major Irish castles: Strancally Castle in County Waterford, and Dromoland Castle for Lord Inchiquin. Over the life of the house its notable guests included George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Young, Elizabeth Bowen and Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau.

The 100,000-acre Mitchelstown estate ran into considerable financial difficulty, and after the Great Famine of 1845–51 its owners were forced to sell 70,000 acres through the Landed Estates Court. Internal family squabbling and legal disputes brought further trouble, as did the Land War of the 1880s, in which the estate was prominent.

In June 1922 the castle was forcibly occupied by the Irish Republican Army. The owner of the day, William Downes Webber — second husband of Anna, Dowager Countess of Kingston — was 'evicted' with his relatives and servants to houses in nearby King Square. Republicans held the building over the following weeks and appeared to be preparing it for some kind of siege. In early August some of them stole the contents: paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and William Beechey, along with silver, furniture, wall hangings and mantelpieces.

On 12 August 1922 Mitchelstown Castle was burned on the orders of a local republican leader, P. J. Luddy, whose father and grandfather had been middlemen on the Kingston estate. At the same time the military barracks at Fermoy, Mallow, Mitchelstown and Kilworth were burned, along with the military hospital at Fermoy, Mitchelstown workhouse, the Mitchelstown RIC barracks and the railway viaduct at Mallow.

Webber sought compensation from the Irish Free State of £149,000 for rebuilding and £18,000 for the contents, intending to rebuild if enough were granted. He died in 1924, and Colonel W. A. King-Harman carried the claim on through the Irish courts. In 1926 Judge Kenny, in the Irish High Court, stated that the destruction of Mitchelstown Castle had been an act of wanton destruction with no military purpose, and awarded £27,500 for the building and the whole £18,000 asked for the contents. King-Harman decided the award was too small a sum to rebuild the castle, and most of it went on replacement properties in Dublin.

The castle's stones were sold to the Cistercian monks of Mount Melleray Abbey in County Waterford, who used them to build a new abbey. In the 1940s the Mitchelstown Co-operative Agricultural Society, which had bought the site together with some of the demesne lands around it, built a milk processing factory on the ground the castle had occupied; the site is owned by Dairygold Co-op.