The Georgian Castle at Clongowes

Abstract

The history of the castle at Clongowes is long and complicated, with several phases of reconstruction and expansion. The imposing facades overlook the long avenue to the front, the pleasure grounds to the north and the playing fields to the east. Its architecture is unmistakeably that of a great estate, but the significance of its castellated style is entrenched in the country’s wider history of religious dissention. Castle Browne, as it was known until its purchase by the Jesuits, is one of a series of late eighteenth-century ‘castles’ built by old Catholic families of the Pale, which includes Ballinlough, seat of the O’Reilly/Nugent family, Malahide Castle of the Talbots, Killeen Castle of the Plunketts, and Gormanston Castle of the Preston family. Professor Alistair Rowan has suggested that Thomas Wogan Browne, the owner of Castle Browne in the late C18, had a hand in several of these designs as an amateur architect, including that of his own house from 1788. These represent the earliest phase of the Castle Revival style in Ireland, a fashion for chivalric architecture that forms part of the wider Gothic Revival that influenced both ecclesiastical and domestic architecture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The revival spread quickly among leading Catholic families, no doubt keen to promulgate the antiquity of their lineages. However the seed of the revival can be found in a source both English and Protestant: the work of James Wyatt at Slane Castle.