Westport House

Colonel John Browne (1638–1711) built the first Westport House on the site of Cahernamart, a ruinous O'Malley fortress on Clew Bay whose Irish name, Cathair-na-Mart, meant the Fort of the Beeves. In 1669 he married Maud Bourke, daughter of Theobald Bourke, 3rd Viscount Mayo, and great-great-granddaughter of the pirate queen Grace O'Malley. A Catholic, he served as a colonel in the Jacobite army during the War of the Two Kings and supplied it with cannonballs and weapons from the iron mines on his lands near Westport. The Jacobite defeat at Aughrim and Limerick in 1691 broke him in the confiscations that followed, and when he died in 1711 his estate had shrunk to a modest mansion at Cahernamart and a few hundred acres.

The Penal Laws that followed left his grandson little choice but to conform to the Church of Ireland. He revived the family's fortunes, replaced the old village of Cathair-na-Mart with a new town he named Westport and set up a linen industry there, and around 1730 hired the architect Richard Cassels to build the east front in Palladian style from limestone quarried south of the estate. He was created 1st Earl of Altamont in 1771. Thomas Ivory drew up further additions in 1773 that were never built, and the house was instead enlarged to a different plan, probably also Ivory's, around 1778.

James Wyatt redesigned a dining room in 1781 and in 1796 designed a greenhouse for John Browne, 3rd Earl of Altamont, who dug the lake west of the house, laid out Westport's principal streets and built the town of Louisburgh. During the 1798 Rebellion the arbitrary conduct of the 3rd Earl's brother Denis Browne against Irish insurgents earned him the family's 'black sheep' reputation; the 3rd Earl was created 1st Marquess of Sligo after the Act of Union of 1800.

Howe Browne inherited as 2nd Marquess of Sligo in 1809 at twenty-one. A friend of Byron and the Prince Regent, he excavated at Mycenae and took the columns of the Treasury of Atreus, using seamen taken from a British warship to carry them home — for which he was sentenced to four months in Newgate Prison. He added the north and south wings; the south wing, built in 1819 to hold a library, burned around 1826 through a fault in its heating and was rebuilt, after which he roofed the open courtyard to make a new library.

In 1834 he was appointed Governor of Jamaica to oversee the apprenticeship system in the years before full emancipation, against opposition from plantation owners, and freed enslaved people on the family's own plantations; the first free village in the world, Sligoville, was named for him, and he voted for Catholic Emancipation before his death in 1845. An exhibition at Westport House has called him 'Champion of the Slaves', a label one historian has called hyperbole, noting that he benefited from slavery from the cradle to the grave and did not free his own slaves until Parliament abolished the institution; he also claimed and received substantial compensation from the British government for their loss. The family's Jamaican estates, Kelly's Pen and Cocoa Walk, had passed to the Brownes through Peter Browne's 1752 marriage to Elizabeth Kelly.

His son George, 3rd Marquess, inherited in 1845 as the Famine struck Mayo. He closed the house, spent £50,000 of his own money relieving tenants, imported meal to Westport Quay, subsidised the local workhouse and published a pamphlet urging reform of the conditions that had led to the famine; in 1854, disillusioned with British policy, he declined the Order of St Patrick, writing 'I have no desire for the honour.' In 1858 he had a staircase of Sicilian marble built by Italian workmen, its balustrade cast in phosphor-bronze by Skidmore of Coventry for around £6,000.

Denis, 10th Marquess, opened the house to paying visitors in 1960, the first house in Ireland to do so; his wife Jose Gauche went through it room by room, discarding the clutter of centuries, and designed and made its furnishing fabrics herself. When Jeremy Browne, 11th Marquess, died in 2014, legislation passed by the Seanad in 1993 let him leave the estate to his five daughters while his titles passed to a cousin in Australia; the daughters sold Westport House to the Hughes family, owners of Portwest, on 17 January 2017, ending hundreds of years of Browne ownership.