Bingham Castle, Oiligh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
House
On the flat, wind-scoured shore of Elly Harbour on the Mullet Peninsula, there are only slight traces left of what was once a castellated country house complete with courtyard offices, five ornamental towers, a private chapel, and formal gardens.
The ambition of the original construction sits oddly against the modest, low-lying landscape around it, and against the near-total erasure that followed.
The house was built in the late 1790s or early 1800s by Denis Bingham, a younger son of the Bingham family, who had settled on the Mullet Peninsula around that time. Castellated style, meaning a domestic building given the external appearance of a medieval castle through the use of battlements and turrets, was fashionable among the Anglo-Irish gentry of the period, lending an air of ancient authority to what were essentially modern residences. Denis Bingham took the aesthetic further than most: the estate walls that enclosed the property were punctuated by five towers, and the western side of the house was organised around a courtyard that included a chapel of ease, a term for a secondary place of worship built for the convenience of those who lived too far from a parish church. By 1838, when the first detailed Ordnance Survey maps of the area were completed, formal gardens had been laid out to the east and south of the house. The Binghams held the property for well over a century before abandoning it in 1925. Demolition began in 1929, and it has been coming down ever since.