Áras na hOidhreachta
Published in Gems of Architecture, Issue 3 (May/June 2021), Volume 29Church Lane, Kilkenny
By Colm Murray
The premises now occupied by the Heritage Council stand on a historic site. The former bishop’s palace in Kilkenny forms part of the St Canice’s Cathedral precinct and, together with the cathedral and round tower, the library and deanery, occupies an elevated position overlooking the medieval city. Work on a palace for the bishop of Ossory began c. 1350 when Bishop de Ledrede (d. 1361) ‘obtained the King’s leave for demolishing three Churches without the Walls, and employed the Stones in building an Episcopal Palace near the Cathedral’. The exact form of the original palace is still the subject of debate, but it is generally accepted to have taken the form of a rectangular ‘long house’. Entry was by way of the upper floor, where the main rooms were supported on stone vaults, with stores below.
Further works were carried out by Bishop Baron (d. 1550), including the construction of a tower-house at the eastern end of the palace. It is a little mind-boggling to think of a tower-house as an extension to an existing building but that is indeed the case in Kilkenny!
Kilkenny’s cathedral precinct suffered badly during the eleven years of warfare that convulsed Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century, and Bishop Williams (d. 1672) recorded in 1661 how he found the palace ‘all ruined, and nothing standing but the bare walls, without roofs’. Large sums of money were spent on rehabilitating the palace and a contract from 1672 shows that £130 14s. went on repairs and new windows alone. Bishop Parry (d. 1677) expended at least another £270 on improvements and a kitchen wing was added at this time.
Bishop Este greatly enhanced the palace in the 1730s, making the medieval hulk conform to the image of a Georgian country house, the entrance signalled by a robust ‘Rustic Palladian’ doorcase copied from an illustration in Practical architecture (1724) by William Halfpenny. Four rooms and a staircase, an elaborate confection of fluted balusters and Corinthian colonettes, were added at a cost of £1,956. Walter Harris commented that Este ‘hath made [the palace] commodious, regular, and noble’.
The two grandest rooms in the palace today are the ground-floor dining parlour and the withdrawing room immediately above it. The detailing of the joinery and plasterwork is in the elegant Regency style and suggests that both rooms were created during the episcopacy of Bishop Kearney (d. 1813).
The Georgian character was identified as the key theme for architectural re-presentation when the Heritage Council began restoring the palace as its new headquarters in 2006. Conscious of the rich tapestry of history at stake, the adaptation and restoration were guided by the ethos that heritage is a living thing and that having a respectful attitude to it does not prohibit sensitively planned contemporary interventions. In line with this, it was decided that a new pavilion of glass and steel would be supported by the foundations of the seventeenth-century kitchen wing, an apt metaphor for the work of the Heritage Council. This heritage-led regeneration has ensured that the former bishop’s palace has been saved for the benefit and enjoyment of generations to come.
Colm Murray is the Heritage Council’s Architecture Officer. Series based on the NIAH’s ‘building of the month’, www.buildingsofireland.com.
Above: Áras na hOidhreachta, headquarters of the Heritage Council. The former bishop’s palace forms part of Kilkenny’s St Canice’s Cathedral precinct. (Heritage Council)
Personal Histories
On this Day
April 24
- 1951 Enda Kenny, TD for Mayo West (1975–97) and Mayo (1997–2020), leader of Fine Gael (2002–17) and taoiseach (2011–17), born in Derrycoosh, Islandeady, near Castlebar, Co. Mayo.
- 1945
Above: The steamship Monmouth Coast—torpedoed by a German U-boat near Tory Island on 24 April 1945. (Paul Johnson Collection)
During the last week of the Second World War, the Monmouth Coast, an unescorted steamship en route from Sligo to Liverpool with a cargo of barytes ore from the mines of Ben Bulben, was torpedoed by a German U-boat some seven miles north-east of Tory Island. The captain and fifteen crewmen (including two Irishmen) lost their lives, but one managed to survive, thanks to two locals from Arranmore. Two days later, whilst beachcombing on the north-eastern coast of the island, they spotted a life-raft floating in a remote sandy inlet; they rowed out to it and lifted the tarpaulin, to discover a wide-eyed teenager, Derek Cragg (17) from Liverpool, the mess-room boy from the Monmouth Coast. He explained that the ship had gone down very quickly and that those of the crew who managed to leap clear were sucked down after it. He, too, was dragged down but somehow managed to make it back to the surface, where he spotted the life-raft and clambered on board. He was given every assistance by the islanders and safely repatriated, but had the north-easterly wind that drove him 25 miles blown him into the adjoining inlet, his raft would have been smashed to pieces. Over 30,000 Allied merchant seamen, of every nationality, lost their lives during the war. Despite our neutrality, Irish Shipping lost two ships. The Irish Pine was torpedoed off Greenland in November 1942 with the loss of all 33 on board, and the Irish Oak was sunk in the North Atlantic in May 1943, though her entire crew was rescued by a sister-ship, the Irish Plane.
- 1912 Justin McCarthy (82), Home Rule politician, leader of the anti-Parnellite faction (1891–6), historian and novelist, died.
- 1916 The Easter Rising began.Sir Ernest Shackleton and five of his crew set out on their epic 720-nautical-mile rescue mission in the James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia.
- 1974 The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) announced that Carnsore Point, Co. Wexford, would be the site of its planned nuclear power station.
May 19
- 1935
Above: ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—his father was in fact Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath.
T.E.—Thomas Edward—Lawrence (46), the legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, died as a result of a motorcycle accident in Dorset. For much of his adult life Lawrence was a troubled man. Though his key role in the British-inspired Arab revolt (1916) against Ottoman Turkish rule earned him international celebrity, he was torn by guilt over Britain’s post-war betrayal of the Arabs with the implementation at Versailles of the notorious Sykes–Picot Agreement. Then there was the issue of identity. At the tender age of ten he discovered that his parents were not married, meaning that he and his four brothers were illegitimate. Later he was to learn that ‘Mr Lawrence’, his father, was, in fact, Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath, who, though married with four daughters, had fled with their governess, Sarah Lawrence, first to Wales—where ‘Ned’ was born—and finally to London. He was eventually to find himself increasingly drawn to his father’s homeland. A close friend of George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte—GBS had helped him to edit his major work, Seven pillars of wisdom (1926)—he mentioned his desire in his surviving letters to visit Ireland and often referred to the works of Seán O’Casey, James Joyce and J.M. Synge. Indeed, he hoped to write a biography of Sir Roger Casement. It seems that he never did try to make contact with his half-sisters. In 1954, almost twenty years after his death, some of his old friends visited the two surviving ones, who were living at 39 Northumberland Road, Dublin. They told them that they had followed their half-brother’s career with great interest but likewise had made no attempt to contact him.
- 1870 The Home Government Association of Ireland was founded by Isaac Butt with the aim of establishing a federal system for the United Kingdom, which would grant Ireland a parliament responsible for national affairs. Succeeded by the Home Rule League (1873).
- 1868 Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, son of Arthur Guinness (1725–1803), brewer and writer who restored St Patrick’s Cathedral (1860), died.