Sandymount Castle, Co Dublin 

Bence-Jones, Mark. A Guide to Irish Country Houses (originally published as Burke’s Guide to Country Houses volume 1 Ireland by Burke’s Peerage Ltd. 1978); Revised edition 1988 Constable and Company Ltd, London.

p. 303. “A C18 house on the southern shores of Dublin Bay transformed in the 1830s into a rather brittle Gothic castle with tower and cloister. The home of Robert Corbet, a great-uncle of Yeats, who afterwards remembered the house from old photographs: “a great door suggesting not Abbotsford but Strawberry Hill – the door that my dream recalled.” Corbet made magnificent gardens here, but overspent himself and neglected his business, so in his old age was obliged to sell Sanyford. This misfortune was too much for him and he drowned himself – “first taking off his rings and chain and watch as became a collector of many beautiful things,” Yeats tells us.”