Castlecomer House, Drumgoole, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
House
Where Castlecomer House once stood in County Kilkenny, there is now a modest two-storey house built in 1979, occupying part of the footprint of something considerably grander.
It is an oddly quiet end to a site that passed through centuries of ambition, conflict, and gradual neglect, leaving almost nothing visible above ground.
The story begins in 1635, when Castlecomer and its surrounding lands were granted to Christopher Wandesforde, an English administrator who set about establishing a town there and, by 1638, had built the original house. The property appeared on the Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, the ambitious mid-seventeenth-century mapping project commissioned under Cromwellian administration to record landholdings across Ireland, and the barony map of Fassadining, County Kilkenny, shows the house as it then stood. Despite this early construction, the Wandesforde family did not actually make the house their principal residence until around 1694. It remained in their orbit until the summer of 1798, when the United Irishmen and Crown Forces clashed in what became known locally as the Battle of Comer. The fighting left both the town and the original Wandesforde residence burnt. Within a few years, around 1802, Anne, Countess of Ormonde and Ossory, had a new house built on the same ground. That replacement structure survived into the twentieth century, but by the 1960s it had fallen vacant, and in 1975 it was almost completely demolished. The 1979 house that followed is the site's current occupant, a functional structure with no particular resemblance to what came before it.