Kenure Park, Co Dublin – demolished 1978

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. 163. “(Palmer, of Castle Lackin/PB1911; Fenwick-Palmer/LG1965) A large mic-C18 three storey house, grandly refaced 1842 to the design of George Papworth…Sold 1964 by Col R.G. Fenwick-Palmer, demolished except for the portico 1978.” 

Listed in Vanishing Country Houses of Ireland by The Knight of Glin, David J. Griffin and Nicholas K. Robinson, published by The Irish Architectural Archive and The Irish Georgian Society, 1988.

p. 60: “A large early to mid 18C house altered c. 1770 when the two large bowed drawing rooms were created. These rooms had magnificent rococo ceilings and carved doorcases, that on the ground floor having a superb Doric chimneypiece. The house was altered and enlarged again in 1842 for Roger Palmer Bart, to the design of George Papworth. Papworth refaced the house and added the granite Corinthian portico. He also created the entrance hall, the library and the central top-lit staircase hall. Teh hosue was sold in 1964 and became derelict before its demolition in 1978. Samples of the rococo ceilings were saved by the OPW. Only the portico remains.

Paddy Rossmore. Photographs. Edited by Robert O’Byrne. The Lilliput Press, Dublin 7, 2019. 

“The lands in this part of the country north of Dublin came into the possession of the Butler familiy in the early fourteenth century, bu tthe first house on this site was only built some four hundred years later by James Butler, second Duke of Ormonde. After the failed Jacobite Rising of 1715 and his voluntary exile to France, the duke’s lands were forfeited and subsequently purchased by Henry Echlin, a lawyer who was created a baronet in 1721. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Kenure came into the possession of the granddaughter Elizabeth, who had married Francis Palmer, originally from County Mayo. It was the third Palmer Bt, Sir William, who owned Kenure in 1827 when it was severly damaged by fire, and who some fifteen years later commissiioned architect George Papworth to refurbish the building. …The last of hte Palmer family to own the house sold the contents in a four day sale in Sept 1964 after which Kenure , acquired by the local authority, sat empty and a prey to vandals until demolished – other than the portico – in 1978.” 

In Blake, Tarquin. Abandoned Mansions of Ireland II: More Portraits of Forgotten Stately Homes. Collins Press, Cork, 2012. 

http://lordbelmontinnorthernireland.blogspot.com/2013/09/kenure-park.html

THE PALMER BARONETS, OF CASTLE LACKIN, WERE MAJOR LANDOWNERS IN COUNTY MAYO, WITH 80,990 ACRES

THEY OWNED 3,991 ACRES OF LAND IN COUNTY DUBLIN 

ROGER PALMER (alleged to have been the third son of Edward Palmer, of Nayton and Casterton, Norfolk) went over to Ireland and had a grant of Castle Lackin, and many other lands in County Mayo, in 1684. His signature appears to the address from the nobility and gentry of County Mayo to CHARLES II in 1682.

The Palmer family had come to Ireland in 1681 from Norfolk, and had acquired lands in County Mayo, where by the end of the 19th Century, they had amassed 80,000 acres. 

THOMAS PALMER, of Castle Lackin, County Mayo, second son of Roger Palmer, of Palmerstown, in the same county, was succeeded by his eldest son,

ROGER PALMER (1729-90), MP for Jamestown, 1761-8, Portarlington, 1768-83, who was created a baronet in 1777, designated of Castle Lackin.

Sir Roger wedded Miss Andrews, and had issue,

JOHN ROGER, his successor;
WILLIAM HENRY, succeeded his brother;
Sophia.

He was succeeded by his elder son,

SIR JOHN ROGER PALMER, 2nd Baronet, who married Mary, only daughter of the Rev Thomas Althem, and was succeeded at his decease, in 1819, by his brother,

SIR WILLIAM HENRY PALMER, 3rd Baronet, of Castle Lackin, who espoused Alice, daughter of _____ Franklin, and had issue,

WILLIAM HENRY ROGER, his heir;
Francis Roger;
John Roger;
Charlotte Alice; Augusta Sophia; Ellen Ambrosia.

Sir William died in 1840, and was succeeded by his eldest son,

SIR WILLIAM HENRY ROGER PALMER, 4th Baronet (1802-69), who married and was succeeded by his only son,

LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR ROGER WILLIAM HENRY PALMER, 5th and last Baronet (1832-1910), MP for Mayo, 1857-65, High Sheriff of County Mayo, 1888.

The Palmers owned a number of seats, including Keenagh Lodge, Crossmolina, and the ruinous Castle Lackin in County Mayo; Cefn Park, near Wrexham, North Wales; Glenisland, Maidenhead, Berkshire.

Their principal Irish seat (through marriage) was Kenure Park, near Rush, County Dublin, where the estate comprised 3,991 acres.

Lieutenant-General Sir Roger Palmer, 5th and last Baronet, MP for Mayo, 1857-65, was Ellen Palmer’s only brother.

He resided at Kenure with his wife, Gertrude Millicent, until his death in 1910.

Lady Palmer survived her husband for many years. She continued to spend much of her time in Kenure (above) until her death in 1929.

There are people in Rush who still remember the parties held in the house for the children of the town.

Sir Roger and Lady Palmer left no heirs, and the property devolved to Colonel Roderick Henry Fenwick-Palmer, who had fought in the 1st World War, and still bore the marks of shrapnel wounds to his face.

He had property of his own in Wrexham, North Wales, and only came to Kenure in the summer.

A plain man, he was not given to living the high life, apart from dining occasionally with friends, such as the late Lord Revelstoke.

He spent a lot of money trying to keep the house in repair.

He was finally defeated by rising costs on a property which was not making money.

Part of the estate had already been sold years before.

He eventually sold Kenure to the Irish Land Commission, in 1964, for £70.000.

Most of the land was divided up among local farmers.

The remainder was sold to Dublin County Council for housing and playing fields. 

The woodland was cleared and all that now remains of the trees, which once dominated the skyline, is a small area around the main gate.

The front gate lodge is now the local Scouts’ Den.

The gate lodge at Skerries Road belongs to Rush Cricket Club, which has beautifully refurbished it.

The Gate-Keeper’s Lodge, the walled garden, the Steward’s Lodge, the pond and shady avenues, have all gone the way of the big house itself. Only the portico remains, a stark remainder of what once was there.

The contents of the house were auctioned in September 1964, the auction lasted four days and realised £250,000, which would be over £1,000,000 in present day values.

Socially, Kenure had been a place apart from the ordinary life of the town, but it had been there for hundreds of years, an essential part of the Rush scene.

The general feeling was one of regret and disbelief that it was disintegrating.

As landlords, the Palmers had not been the worst.

However, there had been some evictions, and one action, which is still adversely remembered, was the removal of some of their tenants from their ancient holdings in order to lengthen the main avenue and have the main entrance gate near the town.

Nevertheless the Palmers were in many ways beneficent to Rush.

They gave land for the Catholic and Protestant churches, for a presbytery and for a teacher’s residence.

In 1896, when the Catholic church was being refurbished, they donated the seating for the nave, and a brass memorial tablet in the church testifies to this.

A portion of the estate was allocated to the local cricket club, and it was certainly the most beautifully situated cricket pitch in north County Dublin.

Dublin County Council was left with an empty mansion, for which they could find no buyer.

The house continued to deteriorate.

During this time it was rented to a film company and a few films were made there, including “Ten Little Indians,” “Rocket to the Moon,” and “The Fall of Fu Manchu.”

In 1978, after a series of incidents in which the house was vandalized and set on fire, with the inevitable water damage that resulted from the fire engines having to put out the blaze, the house was in a very dangerous condition structurally.

The County Council decided it had no choice but to demolish the house.

Within a few days, all that was left of this once great house was a mountain of rubble, from which the massive portico arose, forlorn and lonely against the sky.

First published in September, 2011. Select bibliography: KENURE HOUSE AND DEMESNE

https://theirishaesthete.com/2025/03/31/kenure-park/

Two Days to Demolish the Work of Centuries

Mar31by theirishaesthete

Rush is a coastal town lying some 15 miles north of central Dublin. Following the Anglo-Norman settlement in the late 12th century, much of the land in this area fell under the control of the Butler family, although the latter’s main base was further south in what are now Counties Kilkenny and Tipperary. As a result, during the medieval period the property was leased to a succession of tenants. In the mid-17th century, the estate was owned by James, the 12th Earl of Ormond and future first Duke of Ormond and according to the Civil Survey of 1654, the property was then occupied by one Robert Walsh. Estimated to extend to 300 acres, and valued at £120, the estate consisted of ‘one Mansion House of stone & one slated house of Office, a Barne & Stable slated, one thatcht Barne two other houses of office thatcht, six tenements, five cabbins part of an old castle Valued by ye Jury at five hundred poundes, a garden plott, one young orchard with some young trees set for ornament, a ruined Chappell of Ease, one horse mill now out of use & one decayed Pigeon House.’ Subsequently, a branch of the Hamilton family held the estate: within the walls of the ruined St. Catherine’s church is a tomb remembering ‘the affable, obliging, exemplary, wise, devout, most charitable, most virtuous and religious, the RT. Hon George Lord Hamilton, Baron of Strabane’ who died there in 1668. However, the Rush property was once more in the possession of the Butlers until 1715 when the second Duke of Ormond’s was attainded after he had fled to France and given his support to the Jacobite cause. The estate was then acquired by Henry Echlin whose great-grandfather Robert Echlin had moved from Scotland to Ireland where he was appointed Bishop of Down and Connor in 1612. A judge and ardent bibliophile, Henry Echlin was created a baronet in 1721 and on his death four years later, the title and estate in Rush passed to his grandson, Sir Robert Echlin. The latter’s wife Elizabeth (née Bellingham) continued the family’s engagement with books, being a writer and friend of Samuel Richardson (she is remembered for having penned an alternative, less shocking, end for Clarissa). Like George Hamilton before him, Sir Robert, who died in 1757, is buried in the now-ruined St Catherine’s church, his tomb reading 
‘Here lies a man without pretence,
Blessed with plain reason and common sense,
Calmly he looked on either life and here
Saw nothing to regret or there to fear.
From nature’s temperate feast rose satisfied
Thanked Heaven that he lived, and that he died.’
Readers familiar with the works of Alexander Pope will recognised that the first two lines are a variant of those written by the poet for his On Mrs Corbet, who died of a Cancer in her Breast, while the other four come from Pope’s epitaph to Elijah Fenton. 

Sir Robert Echlin had no direct male heir and so the Rush estate and baronetcy passed to his nephew, Sir Henry Echlin who appears to have been something of a wastrel and who dissipated the greater part of his inheritance before dying suddenly in 1799. Long before then, gambling debts had cost him the Rush estate which in 1780 was bought by his cousin Elizabeth. A daughter of Sir Robert, she had been left a mere shilling by her father who disapproved of what he deemed Elizabeth’s unsuitable marriage to Francis Palmer of Castle Lacken, County Mayo (for more on the Palmers and Castle Lacken, see https://theirishaesthete.com/2022/09/12/castle-lacken). Thus the estate passed into the hands of the Palmers who chose to rename the place Kenure Park (from the Irish Ceann Iubhair, meaning the Headland of the Yew Trees), by which it has been known ever since. Francis and Elizabeth Palmer’s son, Roger, on his death in 1811 bequeathed ‘May Money’ to the area. According to the terms of his will, £2,500 was to be laid out in Ireland ‘in proper securities at 6% p.a. compound interest, and I desire that the interest be employed every succeeding year, in the month of May, for the purpose of giving a marriage gift to ten women. Never married, between the ages of twenty & thirty-two years, at the rate of £10 each.’  Furthermore, ‘They must be from the poorest & born upon any part of my estate in the County of Dublin, but women born in the environs of the town of Rush, within two miles of my estate be preferred.’ Seemingly this fund still exists, although now dormant. Meanwhile, successive generations of Palmers lived on the estate until the death without a direct male heir of Lt. General Sir Roger Palmer, fifth baronet, in 1910. Kenure Park then passed to Colonel Roderick Henry Fenwick-Palmer who retained the property until 1964 when, unable to maintain it any longer, he sold the place to the Irish Land Commission for £75,500. Most of the land was divided between local farmers, with the rest acquired by Dublin County Council for housing and playing fields.

A succession of houses were constructed on what eventually became known as the Kenure estate. The scant remains of what is thought to be a late-medieval tower house lie to the north of the later Palmer residence, and this may have been the ‘Mansion House of stone’ mentioned in the Civil Survey of 1654. In any case, that building was succeeded by another, constructed either during the time of the dukes of Ormond or else soon after the estate came into the hands of the Echlins. A description of this house survives, since it was visited in June 1783 by the antiquary Austin Cooper who noted that ‘About half a mile from the (Roman Catholic) Chapel is Rush House, once the seat of the Echlin family, and which now belongs to a Mr. Palmer. It is a large quadrangular building in the old style, terminated by a hewn parapet ornamented with urns. In the front is a small pediment supported by four Tuscan pillars, which evidently appears to be a modern addition. The situation of it is low, but the view of the sea agreeable. The improvements about it are very neat and kept in good order.’ This late 17th/early 18th century house appears to have remained intact until the outbreak of fire in 1827 but the damage cannot have been too serious since photographs show both the bow-ended drawing room and the room above it had elaborate rococo ceilings in the style of Robert West. In 1842-44 extensive work was carried out on the building to the designs of George Papworth, the exterior refaced in stucco in the manner of a Nash London terrace and a tremendous pedimented Corinthian portico of granite added to the facade. Inside, the entrance hall was given engaged Doric columns and walls covered in yellow scagliola. Beyond this rose a top-lit Imperial staircase with ornate wrought-iron scrolled balustrading, further Doric columns on the ground floor and Ionic pilasters above. All  survived until 1964 when the house was sold and a four-day auction held to dispose of the contents, which realised a total of some £250,000. Contemporary reports noted that a pair of Buhl cabinets went for just £120, while a Chinese Chippendale display cabinet, sold to a London dealer, made £6,800, seemingly the highest price yet paid for a single piece of furniture at auction in Ireland. Today these figures seem absurdly low. To give a couple of examples: in June 2008, that same Chinese Chippendale cabinet was sold at auction by Christie’s for more than £2.7 million. And in October 2006, two mid-18th century chairs attributed to the London cabinet makers William and Richard Gomm and once part of a set of five in Kenure Park, sold for US$408,000.  Meanwhile, an undignified fate awaited the house itself, which was left standing empty by the county council, subject to the inevitable decay and equally inevitable assault by vandals who eventually managed to set fire to the place. Finally, after 14 years of neglect, the authority sought tenders for Kenure Park’s demolition, although after local petitioning, Papworth’s great portico was left standing, a melancholic reminder of what had been lost. As a headline in the Irish Times noted in September 1978, it took ‘Two Days to Demolish the Work of Centuries…’

https://theirishaesthete.com/2025/04/04/kenure-park-2/

Kenure Park

Apr4by theirishaesthete

After Monday’s post about the melancholy fate of Kenure Park, County Dublin, here are the other remains of the estate: two gate lodges. The first of these, close to the centre of Rush town and erected around the mid-19th century, stands inside curved quadrant walls of wrought iron concluding in granite piers with vermiculated bands and concluding in spherical finials, this work. believed to date from c1740. The lodge itself, of single storey and three bays with a pedimented central breakfront, appears to be currently unused and suffers from having the render stripped from its exterior. The second lodge, which lies to the north of the now-demolished house, is again of single storey and three bays with a central pedimented breakfront. Thought to date from c.1830, the building retains its render which features boldly vermiculated quoins. In this case, however, the gate piers are in a much poorer state of repair.