Castletown is the largest and grandest Palladian country house in Ireland. It was built for William Conolly (1662-1729), the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons. He was a lawyer from Ballyshannon, County Donegal, a native born Irishman of humble origins who made an enormous fortune out of land transactions in the unsettled period after the Williamite wars. By the 1720s he was acknowledged to be the wealthiest man in Ireland and he built Castletown as a symbol of his importance and as a patriotic gesture. Sir John Perceval in a letter to Bishop Berkeley of August 1722 remarked:

I am glad for the honour of my country that Mr. Conolly has undertaken so magnificent a pile of building. ..this house will be the finest Ireland ever saw, and by your description fit for a Prince, I would have it as it were the epitome of the Kingdom and all the natural rarities she afford should have a place there.

Bishop Berkeley was influential in the design and planning of Castletown, he recommended the use of Irish craftsmen and materials in building where possible. He may have suggested the inclusion of a long gallery and the building of the obelisk.

Soon after the project got underway Conolly met Alessandro Galilei (1691-1737), an Italian architect, who had been employed in Ireland by Lord Molesworth in 1718. He designed the façade of the main block in the style of a 16th century Italian town palace. He returned to Italy in 1719 and was not associated with the actual construction of the house which began in 1722. Sir Edward Lovett Pearce (died 1733), a young Irish architect, on his Italian grand tour became acquainted with Galilei in Florence and through this connection he was employed by the Speaker to complete Castletown when he returned to Ireland in 1724. Pearce had first hand knowledge of the work of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) and his annotated copy of Palladio's Quattro libri dell'architettura survives. It was Pearce who added the Palladian colonnades and the terminating pavillions. This layout was the first major Palladian scheme in Ireland and soon had many imitators.

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Speaker Conolly's widow continued to live at Castletown after his death in 1729. The house remained unfinished and it was not until after his great- nephew Tom Conolly inherited Castletown and married Lady Louisa Lennox (1743-1821) in 1758 that work on the house was renewed. Lady Louisa, the fifteen year old daughter of the 2nd Duke of Richmond, was brought up at Carton, the neighbouring estate, by her eldest sister Emily, Countess of Kildare (later Duchess of Leinster).

The Castletown papers, estate records and account books, together with Lady Louisa's diaries and correspondence with her sisters, provide a valuable record of life at Castletown and also of the reorganisation of the house. Lady Louisa's letters from the 1750s onwards are revealing of the fashions in costume design, fabric patterns and furniture. She played an important part in the alteration and redecoration of Castletown during the 1760s and 1770s. As no single architect was responsible for all of the work carried out, she supervised most of it herself. Much of the redecoration of the house was done to the published designs of the English architect Sir William Chambers (1723-1796) who never came to Ireland himself. Chambers also worked for Lady Louisa's brother, the 3rd Duke of Richmond, at Goodwood in Sussex. In a letter, written in July 1759, Lady Louisa mentions instructions given by Chambers to pis assistant Simon Vierpyl who supervised the work at Castletown.

All text copyright of Dr. Paul Caffrey. Copies of the guidebook are available from Dr. Caffrey at caffreyp@ncad.ie