Country house, Bilboa, Co. Limerick

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Country house, Bilboa, Co. Limerick

A three-storey square ruin rising from the Limerick countryside, its forty windows now open to the weather, Bilboa Court is the kind of place that raises more questions than the landscape readily answers.

What survives is substantial enough to suggest real ambition: a block roughly eighteen metres on each side, built chiefly in brick but with cut stone finishing the corners, doors, and window surrounds. Beneath it all, spacious vaults and cellars extend underground, and somewhere nearby the remains of orchards mark where a more ordered world once spread outward from the house.

The Ordnance Survey Name Books for Doon parish, compiled around 1840, preserve a brief account of the building's origins and decline. The house was put up between 1690 and 1700 by the Reverend Dean Story, a man whose biography crossed unusually distinct lines: he held a clerical title yet had also served as a colonel under King William, the Dutch prince whose victory at the Boyne in 1690 reshaped land ownership across Ireland and brought men like Story to prominence. Story was buried in the same townland after his death, his grave presumably somewhere in the vicinity of the house he built. Two further colonels occupied the property after him in succession, the last being a Colonel Wilson, who was in residence in 1769. After Wilson, no named occupant appears in the record, and the building began its long, quiet deterioration into the ruin described some seventy years later.

Bilboa Court sits in the parish of Doon in County Limerick. The ruin, because of its scale and the relative solidity of its remaining walls, is visible rather than easily missed, though access to agricultural land in Ireland generally requires awareness of who owns the ground. The vaults and cellars noted in the 1840 account are worth bearing in mind if exploring the immediate surroundings, since such underground features can be obscured by vegetation and collapse over time. The cut-stone detailing at corners and openings rewards close attention as a record of the craftsmanship that went into what was clearly intended as a house of some consequence.

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Bilboa, Co. Limerick
52.6261741,-8.28580546

Ref: LI01013

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