Glenveagh Castle

Glenveagh Castle is in the wrong place for everything it represents. It is too beautiful for the man who built it, too remote for the American aristocrat who perfected its gardens, and too Irish-nationalist in its eventual history for the British Ascendancy context in which it was constructed. The castle sits on the shore of Lough Veagh — a long, cold, glacial lake enclosed by the quartzite ridges of the Derryveagh Mountains in the heart of County Donegal — and it has been accumulating a complicated identity ever since John George Adair began building it in 1870.

Adair was a County Laois-born land speculator who had acquired large tracts of Donegal in the 1850s and 1860s. In April 1861, nine years before the first stone of Glenveagh Castle was laid, he evicted 244 tenants from his estates in the Derryveagh area — men, women, and children, including the very infirm and the very young — in a single operation carried out in mid-winter, ostensibly in response to the murder of his Scottish factor James Murray, though no tenant was ever convicted of the killing. The 244 people were cleared from 28,000 acres of Donegal to make way for deer and sheep. Most emigrated to Australia, where Adair's Cornelia was American-born and organized emigrant assistance. The Derryveagh Evictions were reported extensively in the nationalist press; they became one of the formative episodes of the Land League agitation that would, twenty years later, transform the legal relationship between landlord and tenant in Ireland. And on the land thus cleared, Adair built himself a Scottish Baronial castle.

The castle he built (1870–1873) is, whatever else it is, very beautiful. The Scottish Baronial style — turreted, battlemented, asymmetric, dramatic in silhouette — was the fashionable idiom for Victorian aristocratic construction in the British Isles since Prince Albert had applied it to Balmoral in the 1850s. Adair's castle is a compact version: a rectangular tower house with a round tower at one corner, battlemented parapet, lakeside terraces, and a position on the water's edge that maximises the reflection on Lough Veagh. The Derryveagh Mountains rise steeply on both sides. The approach by the park's winding estate road, through oak and birch woodland beside the lake, is one of the finest approaches to any castle in Ireland.

Adair died in 1885; his American wife Cornelia, born Cornelia Ritchie of New York, continued to manage the estate and made it a destination for Ascendancy summer visitors. In 1929, the castle was purchased by Arthur Kingsley Porter, a Harvard professor of medieval art history whose work on Romanesque sculpture had made him one of the most influential art historians in the world. Porter and his wife Lucy used the castle as a summer retreat and were popular figures in local Irish life. In July 1933, Porter went for a walk on nearby Gola Island and was never seen again. His body was never recovered. The circumstances of his disappearance have generated speculation ever since — accidental drowning in the island's rocky coastline is the most likely explanation, but the combination of the lonely setting, the mysterious outcome, and the subsequent theories (deliberate staged disappearance to escape scandal, an IRA killing, a cover-up) has made Porter's fate one of the unexplained questions attached to Glenveagh's history.

The castle's definitive owner was Henry Plumer McIlhenny, who bought the estate in 1937. McIlhenny was the grandson of Bernard McIlhenny, the man who had patented the Tabasco sauce bottle opener and made the family's Philadelphia fortune; he was a board member of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a connoisseur of extraordinary sophistication, and a host whose weekends at Glenveagh attracted figures including Grace Kelly, Greta Garbo, and Derek Hill. What McIlhenny added to the castle was the gardens — a sequence of Italian, Belgian terraced, pleasure, and walled kitchen gardens on the lakeshore terraces below the castle tower, planted with rhododendrons, azaleas, ferns, and specimen trees from around the world. The gardens McIlhenny created over four decades are among the finest private gardens in Ireland.

In 1981, McIlhenny gave the castle and 16,000 acres to the Irish state; the transfer was completed in 1983. The Irish government added surrounding land to create Glenveagh National Park, now covering approximately 16,540 hectares — Ireland's fourth largest national park and the largest stretch of wild land in the country. The castle and its gardens are the park's centrepiece and its principal visitor attraction.

The GYG-listed private guided walk (t1180813, 'New activity,' 0 verified reviews, from $163 per person, 1.5 hours, English-language guide, Northwest Sherpa Tours) covers the national park's peatland, bog woodland, and garden terraces on a private circuit ending at the castle exterior. **GYG's own Includes list explicitly states that the castle interior tour is NOT included** — the tour ends at the castle exterior. Visitors who want to go inside the castle (the state apartments and kitchen preserved from McIlhenny's occupation, open seasonally) should purchase a separate entry ticket at the castle reception (€5 per adult, approximately), available April to October. In winter, only the park and exterior are accessible.