dunsany castle

Lord Dunsany was born, not in Meath but on a leafy square in the Regent's Park area of London, where one of his earliest memories was that of sun lighting up the first marigolds of summer. As a boy, though schooldays were spent at Cheam and Eton, he often holidayed at what he called his grandfather's Irishplace, Dunsany Castle in County Meath. Founded around 1200 by Hugh de Lacy, one of the leaders of the Norman invasion, the castle and the neighbouring castle of Killeen passed, in 1403, by marriage to Sir Christopher Plunkett. Killeen was subsequently left to his eldest son, ancestor of the Earls of Fingall, and Dunsany to his second son who became the first Baron of Dunsany. The ivy-clad one of the most beautiful houses associated with a writer in Ireland.

Lord Dunsany had many great friends at Dunsany, chief among these being Francis Ledwidge, the young poet, also from Meath, whose gifts he originally discovered and whose reputation he did so much to establish. In the library the two worked on Ledwidge's poems, correcting grammar and perfecting technique, with Dunsany selecting which one should be sent to publishers, he himself writing the letter of introduction. Nor was Ledwidge the only writer to travel up the long avenue to the castle. Others who came were Yeats and Lady Gregory, Shaw and Oliver St. John Gogarty. In later years, the short story writer Mary Lavin was to benefit greatly from Dunsany's friendship.

In the last ten years of his life, though the castle had been signed over to his only child, Randal, the writer still visited Dunsany often, and it was in Ireland, at a Dublin nursing home, that he died after an appendix operation from which he never recovered consciousness. After the funeral in England a memorial service was held at Kilmessan in County Meath at which, by his own request, crossing the Bar was read.