On a clifftop above the western shore of the Barrow and Suir estuary in County Waterford, there are walls and bastions enclosing a roughly rectangular area of around 250 metres by 240 metres. To look at them now is to see the remnants not just of a failed military installation, but of an entire imagined city that never came to be.

The story begins in 1782, when Genevan democrats were displaced following a revolution in Switzerland. Lord Temple, who served as Viceroy of Ireland, arranged for grants of land totalling some 11,000 acres at Newtown and Passage in County Waterford, along with financial support, to establish what was envisioned as a model town. The plan was ambitious: 50 houses, public buildings, and an Academy were to be constructed to receive the refugees. The settlement was to be called New Geneva. In the end, the immigrants never arrived, and the planned town came to nothing. A military barracks was built on the site during the 1780s instead, and the compound later served as a prison during the 1798 Rebellion, when thousands of United Irishmen and their allies took up arms against British rule. By 1841 the barracks had been abandoned entirely.

What remains today are the mortared stone walls, standing between three and four metres high, with corner bastions at three of the four corners, the south-eastern one having been lost. A terrace of ruined buildings runs parallel to the northern wall, which still retains its entrance gate. The whole enclosure is a material record of two successive failures: first the utopian project that never materialised, and then the military use that outlasted it by only a few decades.