tullynally castle and gardens

Guided tours take place in the main rooms and the splendid Victorian kitchens and laundries. A magnificent family coach is on display in the outer courtyard. The tearoom is open at weekends and bank holidays. The gardens, enclosing nearly 30 acres, are laid out in the early 19th Century, they have recently been restored to much of their former splendor and include a walled flower garden, a grotto and two ornamental lakes. Visitors may also enjoy a circular woodland walk around the park, offering splendid views.

Masonry walls ten-feet thick are all that remain of the castle that originally stood here in 1655 when Tullynally was purchased by Henry Pakenham, ancestor of the Earls of Longford. Visitors entering the castle will first arrive in the great hall - an enormous room forty-feet square and thirty-feet high with no gallery to take away from its impressive sense of space. A central-heating system was designed for this room by Richard Lovell Edgeworth.

Other features of the room include a number of attractive early nineteenth-century drawings of the castle, a collection of old weapons, family portraits and an Irish elk's head dug up out of a bog - once a familiar feature of Irish country house halls. One of the most fascinating features of Tullynally Castle is surely the rooms below stairs. Visitors can tour the splendid kitchen with its great ovens, a great pestle and mortar, an early ice chest and a dresser with gleaming brassware probably bought for the kitchen when it was built in the 1840s.