The Celtic Tiger has come and gone. Over the past 30 years, billions of pounds poured into Irish houses and then drained out again. The ruins of Ireland have slumbered on through the peak, the trough and the current blessed recovery. Medieval castles, Georgian country houses, Victorian lodges… They cling on, disappearing under the ivy, slowly crumbling, in demesnes across the island of Ireland.
As Robert O’Byrne, aka the Irish Aesthete, writes in his new guide Ruins of Ireland, we tend to think Ireland lost most of its great houses as a direct result of the Troubles of the early 1920s. Several hundred did get burnt to the ground then. But lots more were dismembered and abandoned thanks to public indifference, and sometimes outright aggression, as grand houses were associated with the hated Anglo-Irish landlord class.
Meanwhile, sex and drink — those reliable old homewreckers — have been dissolving fortunes and knocking down mansions for centuries.
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