One family, six centuries and an Irish house of unsurpassed beauty: The fascinating tale of Curraghmore

In a letter of October 1750, the agent of the Earl of Tyrone, Thomas Rogers, described a bizarre visit to Curraghmore by Archbishop George Stone, the Primate of All Ireland. Arriving unannounced, Rogers reported, the Archbishop’s party had ‘forced the lock and bolt of the gate and rode into the front up to the door. Betty the housemaid was opening the windows by lifting up the sashes to air the house, when the Primate alighted at the door and he spoke to her. She said she would go for the key and open the door directly; he said he was in haste and desired her not [to], but to hand him out a chair, which she did and he went into the window with the gentlemen’.

Once inside, the Primate demanded to see ‘the new room… and the new apartment below’. His curiosity satisfied, he was in such a ‘great hurry’ that he ‘went off through the dressing room door and would not suffer the maid to go for the key’. Then, either he, or some in his company, ‘undescreetly rode their horses down the slopes in the fountain garden and all through it and through up to the shell house.... So great was their hurry that they would not give themselves time to walk, but trampled about on horseback and rode off’.

It’s not impossible, given the conflicting political sympathies of the Earl and Primate, that this visit was a calculated affront. Whatever the case, it was also flattering in that the house and its gardens were revealed as objects of outstanding interest. That still holds true today. Curraghmore is set in a spectacular landscape and preserves some of the finest Georgian interiors in Ireland (Fig 3). It also remains in the hands of the family that created it, their local connections stretching back to about 1200, when King John granted one Henry le Poer the barony of Donoyle (now Dunhill), Co Waterford. Henry was one of several Poers — or Powers as the name became — involved in Ireland at the time and whose descendents integrated into local society. So widely and deeply did the family penetrate eastern Waterford that it was known by the 16th century as ‘Powers Country’.

The precise origins of Curraghmore as a family seat are obscure, but, by tradition, the tower fossilised within the present entrance front was built by Richard Power (d. 1483). It was not until 1535, however, that his grandson and namesake was created Baron le Power and Coroghmore. Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland, visited ‘the house that the Lord Power is Baron of’ in 1575 and was pleased with the hospitality he received here. By this date, the late-medieval tower was almost certainly connected to one or more domestic ranges beside it, much like the nearby Ormond Castle, Co Tipperary. Certainly, that was the arrangement implied by the Civil Survey of 1654, which describes the Waterford property as ‘a fayre Castle and a goodly stone house’.

The survey also sheds an interesting light on the setting of Curraghmore, the name of which means ‘the great bog’. It describes the Barony of Upperthird, in which it stands, as possessing ‘coarse, barren, and mountainous soil (for the most part)’. In this bleak landscape — hard to imagine today — the castle enjoyed an orchard, meadow and a ‘fine wood’. The account goes on to note the ‘River Clodeth running within a musket shot thereof on the south, upon which there is a bridge not very far from the said castle’. King John’s Bridge, so called, still remains.

In 1654, Curraghmore was in the possession of John, 5th Baron. He is simply described in the survey as an ‘Irish Papist’, but, crucially, he must also have been what others termed ‘distracted’. His mental incapacity, which lasted until his death in 1666, was seemingly protection from the upheavals of the civil wars. Certainly, the family avoided either committing itself or being dispossessed afterwards. That said, it may have been with an eye to survival that, in the 1650s, John’s son, Richard, married Dorothy, the eldest daughter of Arthur Annesley, 1st Earl of Anglesey, who was also his father’s guardian.

Whatever the case, Richard began to engage with English politics and culture. His career prospered following the Restoration and, in May 1673, he attempted to engineer a match between his seven-year-old son, John, and niece (his ward), the 12-year-old Katherine Fitzgerald of Dromana. The union, solemnised by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace, promised to link his own property with the neighbouring Barony of Decies. Two years later, Katherine successfully secured an annulment, asserting that she had been forcibly married. Shortly before this, on October 9, 1673, Richard was created Viscount Decies and Earl of Tyrone.

The fortunes of the new Earl fluctuated wildly. In 1679, he was implicated in the Popish Plot and imprisoned in Dublin Castle and then the gatehouse at Westminster until 1684. Under the Catholic rule of James II, he was made Lord Lieutenant of Co Waterford, raised a regiment of foot and sat as a peer in the Irish Parliament. Then, he was captured by the forces of William III at Cork and taken to the Tower of London, where he died in 1690. He was succeeded in quick succession by his two sons, both Protestants. In 1692, the elder, John, 2nd Earl, successfully restored the family title and lands. He died the following year and became the subject of a celebrated ghost story.

During a discussion on the subject of religion, he made a pact with a kinswoman, Nicola Hamilton, that whoever died first would appear to the other. John died first and accordingly appeared one night, announcing the truth of ‘the revealed religion’, as well as the details of Nicola’s future, including that her son would unite their families. Incredulous, she demanded that the apparition touch her wrist and, for the rest of her life, wore a black ribbon to conceal the scar that this contact with the phantom had caused.

John’s brother, James, 3rd Earl of Tyrone, also failed to produce a son. As a consequence, when he died in 1704, the title became extinct and the patrimony passed to his two-year-old daughter, Catherine. It was, therefore, as a considerable heiress that, in 1717, at the age of 15, she married the wealthy politician Marcus Beresford, the son of Nicola Hamilton in the ghost story. He was created Baron Beresford and Viscount of Tyrone in 1720 and then Earl of Tyrone in 1746.

It was in the context of these complex family affairs that Curraghmore began to assume its modern form. This process began according to a lost inscription in about the year 1700 (an alternative suggested reading of 1707 during Catherine’s minority seems improbable) under the 3rd Earl, who constructed three ranges on a regular U-shaped plan as the core of a new house. These ranges cannibalised parts of the earlier building, including the castle tower that closed the fourth side of its internal courtyard.

An impression of Curraghmore in the early 18th century can be recovered from the combined evidence of four watercolour views by Jonathan Fisher, dating to 1768, and a description by the antiquarian Charles Smith in The Antient and present state of the county of Waterford (1746). It was entered from what is now the garden façade, which was two storeys high and seven window bays wide. The outer pair of windows to each side were projected forward as shallow wings and the central bay was given emphasis with a pedimented doorcase and a sculpture of Minerva. Over the whole structure were high-pitched roofs with dormers set on deeply projecting eaves. This composition is echoed at Beaulieu, Co Louth, which otherwise bears intriguing comparison to Curraghmore.

Inside, the visitor entered a large hall with a stair that divided into two at its first landing. The hall was probably a creation of 1700, but — like the rest of the house — it had clearly been redecorated by 1746. Smith saw it painted with ‘columns, festoons &tc., between which are several landscapes’ as well as a perspectival representation of a dome. He attributes this work, as well as several paintings and a ground floor room ‘entirely painted… in landscape’ with a ‘sleeping Cupid on a marble table’, to Willem van der Hagen, an artist active in Ireland from 1722 until his death before 1745.

As well as producing portraits, landscapes and theatre scenery, Hagen was also contracted in 1728 to supply designs for tapestries in the Irish House of Lords, an obvious point of connection with the Viscount. Indeed, one painting at Curraghmore — of William III’s landing at Carrickfergus — probably relates to this commission. Might Hagen also have helped supply ‘the beautiful tapestry hangings’ Smith saw in ‘an inner chamber’? A fireplace that almost certainly came from these interiors survives recycled as a tomb niche in the nearby Clonegam Church (Fig 6).

By 1746, there were also extensive formal gardens at Curraghmore. ‘The house has the advantage of water on three sides,’ Smith wrote, ‘laid out in large elegant canals and basins… and the banks and terraces are adorned with statues.’ These were fed from the river. There were besides cascades, a ‘greenhouse’ and ‘a shell-house erecting, which when finished, promises to be very curious’. The latter incorporates a sculpture of the Countess (Fig 7) holding a scroll inscribed: ‘In two hundred & sixty one days these shells were put up by the proper hands of the Rt Hon Cathne Countess of Tyrone 1754.’ The date presumably relates to the sculpture rather than the shell work.

On June 1, 1746, there was a serious fire at Curraghmore. According to one report in The General Advertiser, this was caused by ‘the carelessness of a Servant’ and ‘burned down stabling for 40 horses, with granaries, hay-lofts, beds and bedding for most of the servants, a fine mare, several setting dogs, all the saddles, the coach and chair harnesses, besides many other valuable things; but the dwelling-house was not touched’. It must have been this episode that prompted a further transformation of the house, doubtless spurred on by Beresford’s promotion as Earl of Tyrone the following month.

A new set of service buildings and vaulted stables were planned as long, low parallel wings with side gateways (Fig 2). Now lined with horse chestnuts, the effect is reminiscent of a French town square. It is hard to think of any approach to a Georgian house that resembles this. The architect responsible was John Roberts, who was based in Waterford, but had trained in London. His remarkable architectural career also properly began in 1746, when he was commissioned to complete the Bishop’s Palace in Waterford. His patron for this task, Bishop Chenevix, later listed the ‘fine offices he built’ for Lord Tyrone among his works.

The new forecourt reversed the approach to the house (Fig 1), so it must have been in conjunction with its construction that a new front door was punched through the lower floor of the castle tower. What is not clear is whether the spectacular decorative plasterwork in the outer hall within (Fig 4), and the library above (Fig 5), were installed before these changes or as part of them. By extension, whether their magnificent decoration — plausibly attributed to the virtuosi stuccadores Paolo and Filippo Lafranchini, who also worked on the Earl’s Dublin house — relates to Roberts’s work or was completed before 1746.

The present assumption is that these interiors were the ‘new room’ and ‘apartment below’ that Archbishop Stone was so importunate to see in 1750. Yet the barrel vaulting of the lower chamber is hard to imagine as part of an apartment. Added to which, although Smith comments on the magnificent fireplace of the upper room in 1746, he makes no reference to the plasterwork. Was it added later? Perhaps the Archbishop was actually looking at other rooms? If so, they were soon to be torn out to create a spectacular series of 1770s interiors that we will explore in the next article.

This is the first of two articles on Curraghmore. The second will be published on August 23, 2026.

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This feature originally appeared in the July 22, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.