Curraghmore: The great Irish house transformed by the most 'brilliant, exasperating, expensive and chaotic' architect of the 18th century

On August 10, 1783, the vast forecourt of Curraghmore was the scene of a family tragedy. The 12-year-old son and heir to George, Earl of Tyrone, was killed — according to Joseph Hansard in his History, Topography and Antiquities of the County and City of Waterford (1869) — ‘whilst attempting to jump with a spirited horse, a low wooden paling, which at that time ran across the entrance to the courtyard’. The family was devastated and on a hillside above the house began — but never finished — a memorial that was clearly intended to take the form of a monumental Irish monastic ruin with a commanding round tower and incorporating the medieval west window of Waterford Cathedral.

One cruel irony of this terrible accident was that it occurred at a moment when the family was enjoying enormous public success. The parents of the Earl — Marcus Beresford and Catherine de la Poer, whose transformative alterations to Curraghmore from the 1720s were described last week — had produced a large family of three sons and six daughters.

This is the second in a two-part series on Curraghmore — read the first part here.

Collectively, by marriage and ambition, they established themselves at the heart of the Anglo-Irish political establishment, then at the height of its prosperity, independence and confidence.

One telling reflection of their dynastic assurance is a large family portrait by John Astley of about 1760, modelled on van Dyck’s celebrated depiction of the Herberts at Wilton, Wiltshire, that hangs in the entrance hall of the house.

When the Earl inherited Curraghmore in 1763, he confronted substantial family debts, which he partly satisfied by his marriage to the wealthy heiress Elizabeth Monck in April 1769. As the letterist Mary Delany observed, there was ‘no beauty between them but very good fortune’. Recent research by William Fraher shows that the Earl almost immediately turned his attention to remodelling the house and not in a way that answered his father-in-law’s prudent sense of economy. A letter dated January 25, 1772, shows the Earl in detailed correspondence with the 24-year-old architect James Wyatt about the decoration of different rooms in the house.

This letter is remarkable in part because it pre-dates by two days the event that properly launched Wyatt’s career, the opening of the Pantheon on Oxford Street, London (‘the most beautiful edifice in England’, wrote the dazzled Horace Walpole).

That in turn raises the question of how the patron and architect were introduced. Perhaps they met in Rome, where Wyatt trained. No less remarkable, it establishes Curraghmore as the first of Wyatt’s numerous Irish country-house commissions and already fully formed by his Italian experience in the elegant neo-Classical detailing that had catapulted his rival, Robert Adam, to architectural celebrity in the 1760s.

To his English clients, Wyatt was a brilliant, but exasperating figure, expensive and chaotic. In Ireland, however, which he only visited once in 1785, he worked in partnership with professionals who proved much more reliable. Using the rapidly improving links with England, he was not only able to communicate through the medium of drawings, but send out materials such as Coade stone, manufactured to his designs in Lambeth, London. The result was a series of Irish buildings of superlative quality, including his masterpiece Castle Coole, Co Fermanagh (which he never saw).

Wyatt’s executant architect at Curraghmore was Thomas Penrose, a Quaker from Waterford who, early in his career, had ambitions as a landscape painter. He completely transformed the interior of the house and its main reception rooms within the existing shell of the building. Work continued for a decade and a visitor, Daniel Beaufort, in 1779, described the building as ‘modernised, not quite finished’. Wyatt’s external changes included incorporating the attic level of the house as a third full storey. He must also have inserted the broad tripartite front door and fan light in the medieval castle tower shown in views of about 1800. A Coade stone armorial and stag of St Hubert — the family crest — were also installed above.

From the barrel-vaulted outer hall in the basement of the castle tower, a flight of steps rises to a top-lit corridor that extends to the main staircase hall (Fig 3). Its volume was slightly expanded into the central courtyard of the house to accommodate a single, sweeping stair to the bedrooms above. All the polite rooms are arranged at ground level around three sides of this space. They preserve a rich collection of family paintings and furniture. Some were sympathetically, but extensively restored after a serious fire in 1903.

The grandest interior, on account of its sheer scale, is the dining room (or ‘Eating Room’, as it is termed in the 1772 letter to Wyatt), presumably created by knocking earlier spaces together (Fig 2). Set amid delicate plasterwork around the walls are images of the Olympian gods. In the ceiling are images of the seasons by a different hand, possibly Antonio Zucchi or his wife, Angelica Kauffman. Scarcely less magnificent is the Blue Drawing Room (Fig 5) in the centre of the garden front. Its spectacular ceiling incorporates lunette paintings of Classical gods by Zucchi and tromp l’oeil roundels by the Flemish artist Pieter de Gree (Fig 6).

As Wyatt’s changes to Curraghmore drew to a close, the family basked in success. In 1780, one of the Earl’s younger brothers, William Beresford, who had entered into the church, secured his first episcopal appointment. The following year, the second son, John, who was closely involved in the Georgian rebuilding of Dublin, succeeded in getting work to the city Customs House designed by James Gandon under way. Finally, on February 5, 1783, the Earl attended the splendid celebrations of the newly established chivalric Order of St Patrick in Dublin Castle as one of its 15 founding Knights. Six months later, he was mourning the death of his eldest son.

Whatever the private griefs of the family, the Earl’s good fortune otherwise persisted. He was created Baron Tyrone of Haverfordwest in 1786, a title that brought with it a seat in the English House of Lords, and then Marquess of Waterford in 1789. Between these two events, in December 1787, Prince William Henry (later William IV), came to Curraghmore on an impromptu tour of southern Ireland and was entertained with a ball. The diarist Dorothea Herbert, who lived in neighbouring Carrick-on-Suir, gives a giddy account of the event in her Retrospections of an outcast, praising the newly completed interiors of the house. A fall of snow that night left several carriages stuck in the woods afterwards. Of those returning from the ball, she wrote ‘some lost their shoes, some their caps, and not a few their hearts’.

In 1800, the title passed to the eldest surviving son of 1st Marquess, Henry, who soon afterwards married Susanna Hussey, an heiress of the Seaton Delaval estate in Northumberland. Their eldest son, another Henry, who inherited the title in 1826, was notorious for his wild exploits and practical jokes. They included stealing the birching block from Eton College, where he was educated (it sits in the stair hall of Curraghmore), and literally painting Melton Mowbray red one night with his drunken friends. His greatest obsession, however, was with horses and he hunted long, hard and often.

The repeated judgement of early-19th-century visitors to Curraghmore was that the setting was stupendous (Fig 4), but the house ugly. Presumably, it was to rectify this that, in 1833, the architect Daniel Robertson was invited to draw up proposals for recasting Curraghmore as a sprawling, Tudor Gothic mansion. The plan came to nothing, but, in reflection of Lord Waterford’s driving passion, a vast riding school was constructed beside the entrance court by 1835. It was briefly transformed into a ballroom in 1865 and has clearly been remodelled since.

In 1839, Lord Waterford met his future wife, Louisa, at the famous revival of medieval chivalry undertaken by an exclusive and aristocratic Tory circle of the young and beautiful, the Eglinton Tournament. She was one of two remarkable daughters of Charles Stuart, Baron Stuart de Rothesay, a diplomat and from 1831 creator of Highliffe Castle, Dorset. Her sister, Charlotte, married George, Lord Canning, the last Governor-General and first Viceroy of India. Both were remarkable figures, well travelled, highly articulate and accomplished amateur artists. They were also devoted to each other.

Contrary to almost universal expectation, Louisa’s marriage was settled and happy. She toyed with transforming Curraghmore into an Italian Renaissance palazzo, the newly popular style of the moment, and employed the architect William Burn for the purpose. All was set for the work to begin when Lord Waterford was killed in a widely reported hunting accident. She retired as a widow to Ford Castle, Northumberland, where she famously turned her artistic talents to the decoration of the village school (Country Life, January 15, 2014). The estate now passed to her brother-in-law, a clergyman, and then, in 1866, to John Henry, the 5th Marquess, who — according to a plaque attached to the exterior — ‘restored and renovated’ Curraghmore ‘in the year 1874 at a cost of £25,000’.

His far-reaching work included the creation of a new wing on the garden front, the modernisation of services, the addition of balustrades to the external parapets and the re-fenestration of the building with plate glass windows. He also refronted the tower entrance and added a pediment to the garden façade (Fig 1). The architect was Samuel Ussher Roberts and a report in The Clonmel Chronicle of August 24, 1872, adds that the ‘old-fashioned rough-casting of the entire pile has given place to a coating of the finest Portland cement’. The main contractors involved were from Dublin.

The 5th Marquess had eloped with his first wife, a divorcée, Florence Grosvenor Rowley. She died in childbirth in 1873 and is memorialised in Clonegam Church in a striking top-lit memorial by the sculptor Joseph Boehm (Fig 7). Boehm also added a replacement sculpture of St Hubert’s stag above the front door. More changes to the house followed the succession of Henry, 6th Marquess, in 1895, including the addition of several new chimney pieces commissioned from Mrs Kennedy’s Stone Works in Waterford. Much more significant, however, were the repairs that followed the fire in 1903 that burnt out the top floor of the house.

The 19th-century development of Curraghmore took place against a steadily gathering tide of social unrest in Waterford and Ireland as whole. In 1798, the house was placed under guard and in 1848 cannons and guns were stolen from the property. At this time, the architect William Tinsley, who otherwise developed buildings around the estate, helped fortify the property. During the Great Famine, the Marquess and Viscount set up soup kitchens on their estates, avoiding the deprivation and violence witnessed in some areas, but tensions over tenants’ rights built steadily and the Land Acts from 1870 to 1903 gradually reduced the value of the estate. In 1881, the then Marquess sold the hounds of the Curraghmore Hunt in disgust after several meets were violently interrupted.

The property miraculously survived the house burnings of the Irish civil war in the 1920s and the 20th century was not otherwise an easy one. Nevertheless, it has now emerged into happier times. Curraghmore remains one of the very few great Irish houses still in the hands of its owning family and with its collections intact. For readers of Country Life it is additionally intriguing as the family home of Mark Girouard’s mother, Lady Blanche. After her tragic early death in 1940, Dr Girouard spent regular holidays here and with his aunt at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire. These experiences laid the foundations for his interest in architectural history. He wrote up Curraghmore for Country Life in three articles on February 7, 14 and 21, 1963.

The estate is presently in the care of Henry, 9th Marquess and his wife, Amanda, who took responsibility for it in 2015. Their most recent project has been the restoration of the roof, undertaken with the financial support of The Apollo Foundation and overseen by the architect David Sheehan. Other initiatives include the launch of Curraghmore Whiskey by their son, Richard de la Poer Beresford, Earl of Tyrone. As this article appears, the estate is being used for the All Together Now Festival, now in its seventh year, evidence of the ongoing and vibrant development of Curraghmore in the 21st century.

See the Curraghmore House and Gardens website for more details, and to arrange a tour.

Acknowledgements: William Fraher, John Martin Robinson, David Sheehan and Julian Walton

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.