Shanaganagh Castle, Shankill, 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. 256. “(Rowan-Hamilton/IFR; Heyman/LGI1958) A house or castle formerly belonging the the Walsh family; bought ca 1800 by Gen Sir George Cockburn, a soldier, an ardent Whig politician and an avid collector of antiquities, who greatly enlarged it, to the design of one or both of the Morrisons; so that it became a somewhat haphazard mixture of plain late-Georgian and castellated; with a cured bow and a slender battlemented round tower. The Morrison additions included a large ballroom, a dining room and a room called the “Monumental Room” containing Cockburn’s collection of Greek and Roman relics. Having acquired four circular Greek altars and a large Corinthian capital which were too large to display indoors, Cockburn had them erected one on top of another to form a column in front of the house with an inscription commemorating the passing of the Great Reform Bill 1832: but, in 1838, Whig though he was, he put another inscription on the back which read, Alas to this day a Hum Bug.” Shanganagh passed to the Rowan-Hamiltons bythe marriage of Cockburn’s daughter Catherine, to Cdre G.W.R. Rowan-Hamilton. It was sold 1919. Sir Harold Nicholson, whose mother was a Rowan-Hamilton, subsequently bought Cockburn’s Reform Bill monument and disposed its components about the garden as Sissinghurst Castle, Kent…”