PEOPLE
THE KEEPERS
When a castle is your home, it can be tricky to balance family privacy with having an open house to pay the bills. Six custodians of living history tell Lucy White how they do it. Photographs by Simon Burch.
T
he biggest misconception about owning a big old beautiful building is that you are well-off, whereas in fact they are a financial vortex,” admits artist and farmer Eavaun Carmody, who bought Killenure Castle, Co Tipperary, in 2007. Downton Abbey has a lot to answer for then – that, and the myth of surplus service staff. Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence, owner of Howth Castle in Co Dublin, adds: “Highclere has become a character in what is essentially an upmarket soap opera, therefore it can charge a very decent location fee. If you’re a castle owner and you hear the words ‘second series’ then you cheer up ...” The interviewees over the following pages all live in privately owned castles, many open to the public by appointment only. Some are gentry, others blow-ins. Most have grounds open to the public 40 |
DECEMBER 2014/JANUARY 2015
during the summer – a magnet for horticultural studies volunteers as well as tourists. A few host weddings. All, though, run family homes, each owner unanimously agreeing that being custodians of living history ameliorates the day-today travails of, say, a parched moat, a tricky buttress, or even paranormal activity. (Actually, while most of our featured forts are said to be haunted, only Leonie King, who owns Oranmore Castle on Galway Bay, has hard “evidence”: “Our archive room is haunted,” she says. “The bed clothes lift off in the middle of the night. Hence it is no longer a bedroom ...”) For the droves that visit Irish castles – nearly half of all European, and more than a quarter of American holidaymakers, according to Fáilte Ireland – it’s the parklands that provide the biggest draw and, in turn, the biggest returns to their owners. Add a tearoom here and a
working farm there, and it will no longer be a huge money-pit. The tension between commerce and running what is first and foremost a private space though doesn’t come much more pronounced than at Connemara’s Kylemore Abbey, which was built as a castle residence in the late1860s for a British MP. Home to a community of Benedictine nuns for nearly a century, it has had to juggle commercialism with spiritualism in order to survive. The abbey now has a marketing officer and a gift shop that sells the likes of Orla Kiely and Barbour products. “As a religious community it has to keep adjusting to the tourist business,” admits Kylemore’s abbess, Sister Maire Hickey. “I think we have succeeded. It can bring a difficulty, but one learns at the very beginning of life in a monastery to cultivate inner peace. Visitors and commerce aren’t obstacles to that.”