Kilbride House, Co Carlow – destroyed by fire 1927 

Not in Bence-Jones or national inventory

https://archiseek.com/2017/19th-c-kilbride-house-co-carlow/

1880s – Kilbride House, Co. Carlow 

19th century Italianate house added to an earlier house that then became the service wing for the new enlarged building. Destroyed by fire in 1927, and demolished. 

Jimmy O’Toole, The Carlow Gentry: What will the neighbours say! Published by Jimmy O’Toole, Carlow, Ireland, 1993. Printed by Leinster Leader Ltd, Naas, Kildare. 

Chapter: K’Eogh of Kilbride 

p. 138. “[In 1927] John Molyneux K’Eogh had decided to leave his mansion home, the family seat for nearly a century, to live in a more modest house nearby, and with their five year lease about to expire on Altamont, the Lecky-Watsons decided to rent Kilbride House. It was a move, however, with which John K’Eogh’s wife, Mary Butler, was unhappy; feelings, it appears, she had expressed with some force to her family, the Butlers of Mount Leinster Lodge. John and Mary were first cousins. A week before the fire, Cherry Butler told her friend, Daphne Hall-Dare, that she wished Kilbridge House was burned down. She got her wish. 

In her memoirs, written half a century later, Isobel Lecky-Watson gave a vivid account of the fire ‘… never found out who had done it. It was definitely done maliciously, but by whom we never found out, though we had our suspicions.’ 

She writes that John K’Eogh was finding it difficult to maintain the family seat, and her husband Fielding decided to rent it. The owner of Altamont was determined to sell and they could not afford to buy it. 

p. 141. “Kilbride House smouldered for three days, the Watsons returned to Isobel’s beloved Altamont, which they later bought, and following his wife’s death in 1938, John K’Eogh moved to the West of Ireland to live with a niece. The couple had no children, and he died, aged 72, in 1946. Fielding Lecky-Watson died in 1942, and Isobel was 101 when she died in 1983.” 

“The K’Eoghs claim descent from Fergus, King of Ulster, grandson of Roderick the Great, monarch of Ireland. In the 15^th century, the family of MacK’Eogh had extensive estates at Castletroy, in Limerick, which they lost as a result of their support for the Stuart cause. A descendant, John K’Eogh, purchased an estate at Loughlinstown (near Clondalkin), County Dublin, in the latter half of the 18C, and it was his son, George Rous K’Eogh, who purchased the leasehold interest on 2000 acres of the Baillie estate in Kilbride on 27 March 1827. He bought the freehold interest for £3700 in 1847. 

p. 142. George Rous K’Eogh married Marianne Molyneux, daughter of General Sir Thomas Molyneux of Castledillon, Co Armagh. After acquiring the leasehold interest, he immediately initiated major improvements, including the addition of a large extension to the existing farm house, and a large-scale drainage scheme. Granite boulders removed from land provided the materials for both the house, the demesne wall, and the drainage.  

After George Rous K’Eogh’s death in 1850, in Rotterdam, he was succeeded by his eldest son, John Henry K’Eogh, who was born in 1820. He was a Justice of the Peace, High Sheriff and a colonel in the Carlow Rifles. In the 1852 general election, K’Eogh was selected with John Ball as Nationalist candidates against sitting Tory MPs Henry Bruen III and William Bunbury McClintock-Bunbury of Moyle. Ball and Bruen narrowly won…. Colonel K’Eogh’s first wife, Louise Catherine Richards, died in 1863, and they had one son, who died aged 14, and three daughters. In 1869 he married her sister, Frances Richards, and they had three sons and three daughters. Col K’Eogh died at Kilbride in 1888 aged 68. Their eldest son, John Molyneux K’Eogh, who was 18 when his father died, was the last of the family to live at Kilbride.”