Painestown House, Painestown, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
House
A plaque set into the wall of this three-storey County Kildare house carries two dates, 1620 and 1798, and a single family name: Aylmer. That span of a century and three-quarters encompasses some of the most turbulent episodes in Irish history, and the building's current state of poor preservation gives little away about which date marks its construction and which marks something else entirely.
The house sits on level ground that was once formally landscaped, though little of that arrangement survives now. Its southern façade is the more considered face, organised around a projecting central porch with a fine doorway, with three bays extending to the west and two to the east, an arrangement that suggests a deliberate if asymmetrical composition. The double A-roof, a form in which two gabled roof sections meet or run in parallel, adds an unusual silhouette to what is otherwise a relatively plain country house. The Aylmer family, whose name appears on the inscribed plaque, were a prominent Catholic landed family in Kildare, and the year 1798 would have carried particular weight in that context, falling as it does in the year of the United Irish rebellion, in which County Kildare was one of the principal theatres of conflict. Whether the date records a rebuilding, a significant event, or something else is not recorded here, and the building itself, in its current degraded condition, keeps that question open.