The Case in Brief
A Castle Built for Love, Rebuilt for Grief Kylemore Abbey is undoubtedly Ireland’s most photographed building outside Dublin. This grey castle of the Gothic Revival style is reflected in a mountain lake, surrounded by the…
A Castle Built for Love, Rebuilt for Grief
Kylemore Abbey is undoubtedly Ireland’s most photographed building outside Dublin. This grey castle of the Gothic Revival style is reflected in a mountain lake, surrounded by the Twelve Bens and Connemara bogs.
However, not as picturesque but significantly more intriguing is the story behind this architectural masterpiece. The wealth of this place was built on the back of a Manchester factory worker. The wife died and was returned to Ireland from her Egyptian tomb. In addition, it was the Cairo coroner who took care of its embalming. The castle belonged to a bankrupt Duke and was found by nuns who arrived to the end of the war.
A Doctor’s Fortune and a Castle Built for a Bride
Mitchell Henry is born in Manchester to a wealthy Irish-descended cotton merchant and is trained as an eye surgeon and pathologist, rising to become one of the youngest-ever lecturers before his thirty-first birthday at the Royal College of Surgeons, London. Upon his father’s death, the young man inherits the huge family business and also a significant chunk of Britain’s then-largest young fortune. Henry abandons surgery to pursue Liberal politics and eventually ends up representing Galway in the House of Commons for fourteen long years and is even one of the founding members of Isaac Butt’s Home Rule movement.
In 1852, Henry marries Margaret Vaughan, a daughter of a well-known County Down family, and they honeymoon in Connemara. It was enough for him to fall in love with the place for good, as he buys the 13,000-acre Kylemore estate outright later in 1867. Margaret Vaughan takes part in the opening ceremony of the newly built castle on September 4, 1867, by laying the foundation stone herself. Designed by the renowned Irish architect James Franklin Fuller and constructed with the help of an engineer Ussher Roberts and using dynamite, the Kylemore Castle is completed in the early 1870s and has a cost of about £18,000.
The castle has 33 bedroom, four bathrooms, a ballroom with a sprung oak floor, a billiard room, a library, a schoolroom, an icehouse, larders, and a wine cellar with its own private supply of wine. The castle’s walls have carved birds that Henry’s family likes as a sign of their “nesting place,” while above the front door, there is a carved angel holding a scroll with the crest of Margaret’s Vaughan family.
A Wife’s Body, Carried Home in a Glass Coffin
The idyll was short-lived. In 1874, only a few years after its completion, the Henry family returned to Egypt from their holidays. During this trip, Margaret soon fell ill. Despite all efforts, Margaret died after two weeks of suffering and pain. She was forty-five years old, and her youngest daughter was only four years old.
Her body was embalmed in Cairo and returned to Kylemore, where, according to local rumors that persist to this day, she was kept in a glass coffin under the grand staircase in the front hall of the castle, where tenants and family members could file past to pay their respects. This custom was not at the time given the prevalence of home funerals in those days. Eventually, Margaret’s body was laid to rest in a small, modest red-brick mausoleum set in the woods on the estate grounds.
In 1878, Mitchell Henry started on the grounds a neo-Gothic church as a permanent memorial to his wife, modeled loosely on the architecture of Norwich Cathedral. For reasons that were never officially recorded, Margaret’s remains were never relocated to their intended resting place within the newly built church. Today, her bones still lie in their makeshift crypt in the woods, next to her husband’s, who was laid to rest beside her several decades later, following his passing at the age of eighty-four.
Henry never recovered fully from Margaret’s passing. Though he continued in his duties governing the estate and tending to his parliamentary career under the guidance of his elder children, tragedy unfortunately struck again at the Henry family when Margaret’s daughter Geraldine was felled by a carriage accident on the grounds, her infant daughter and the child’s nurse both surviving the crash. Eventually, Mitchell Henry sold Kylemore in 1902 and died at the age of eighty-four, leaving behind considerably less wealth than he had previously boasted.
A Gambling Duke and a Dollar Princess
Buyers were a William Angus Drogo Montagu, the ninth Duke of Manchester, and his wife, the American heiress Helena Zimmerman, nicknamed by the press as a “dollar princess.” She was another of the wealthy young American women who had married poor British aristocrats of the time. The Duke had inherited a large amount of debt, and by the age of 23, he had already gone bankrupt. Helena’s money, which came from her industrialist father Eugene Zimmerman, was supposed to save the drooping aristocrat.
At Kylemore, the newlyweds discarded most of Margaret Henry’s Italian-style interior, including foreign marble and a German stained glass in the staircase hall, to host extravagant dinners and a visit from King Edward VII. Locals, who still revered Margaret, believed that they desecrated her castle by doing so.
Alas, the visit by the King never happened, and, in turn, the marriage and Helena’s fortune failed to save them from ruin. It was long rumored that the Duke had sold Kylemore during a late-night gambling spree. Still, it is more likely that they simply did not have the money to maintain the castle after her father’s death in 1914. The couple moved out in 1914 and divorced in 1931.
The Nuns Who Crossed a War to Get There
The most notable period in Kylemore was the one dating back to 1920 when a community of Benedictine nuns known as the Irish Dames of Ypres arrived there. It was founded by the sisters in 1665 who taught the daughters of Irish Catholic families while they werein exile in Ypres, Belgium, under the penal laws.
Their Belgian-based abbey was destroyed during the First World War, and after being evacuated to England, the nuns decided to move to Ireland for good in 1920, in the middle of the Anglo-Irish War. They bought Kylemore Castle and its approximately 10,000-acre estate for £45,000, completing the purchase on November 30, 1920, and arriving in their new home four days later, in December 4 of that year.
The sisters turned the castle into an abbey and opened an international girls’ boarding school that operated for nearly ninety years, only being closed in June 2010. In 1959, the place was ravaged by fire, leaving it severely damaged, but all nuns survived. The abbey was rebuilt and restored and remains the home of the Benedictine sisters who run it as the non-profit Kylemore Trust.
The Legends Woven Into the Landscape
The White Horse of Pol a Cappal
The most enduring of the legends associated with Kylemore, however, has nothing to do with the Henrys or even the nuns. It concerns the lake. Around this body of water, which reflects the abbey so faithfully, there is a tale that once every seven years a beautiful white horse rises from the water. A white mist covers the lake, and for those who watch it, it resembles a horse galloping up and down the lake. The local Irish name for the lake, Pol a Cappal, actually means “the place of the horse.”
In 2011, staff members at Kylemore witnessed a wonderful sight. The wind was whistling around the lake making little wisps of white that raced back and forth on the water like a horse galloping andracing. This is said to have started talk of the ghostly horse again in the local community.
A House That Remembers Its Grief
Kylemore is not renowned for its ghost sightings as some other Irish mansions, but it does not require many stories to turn one into an enthusiastic believer. This former home of a young widower is a place where his beloved wife was displayed after her funeral and where his daughter died in a carriage accident on the front drive. Even the mansion’s long and eventful history cannot overshadow the tragedy of a poor barren wife, the complete devastation of the family’s aristocratic honor, and the rebirth of the estate on the donations of exiled nuns. This place has too many sad tales to remain deprived of such supernatural phenomena as the legends surrounding Connemara.
What is more, this territory has a deep history well before the arrival of Henry family members, who have significantly contributed to the region’s development. Local folklore keeps telling the tales of giants, a sacred stag, an enchanted hound, and a giant’s burial mound, all of which can be found in the mountainous area near the mansion. Thus, it is no surprise that the tragic stories of the Henry family and the rich history of Kylemore are intertwined with legends about local folklore attractions.
Visiting Kylemore Abbey Today
Kylemore Abbey offers an outstanding visitor attraction and active Benedictine monastery in Connemara, Co. Galway, just 45 minutes from Galway city. This includes an all-inclusive ticket to tour the ground floor of the restored Abbey house, the neo-gothic church (presently under renovation but open to the public) as well as Margaret and Mitchell Henry’s Mausoleum, woodland walks, and a six-acre Victorian Walled Garden with shuttle bus service included in the entrance fee. Guided tours of the gardens are available fromJune, July, and August.
The visitor center and estate will be open daily from 10.00 am to 6.00 pm; the last admission is at 5.00 pm, while the café and gift shop will follow more or less the same schedule. Considering the size of this place and its popularity, checking the most updated opening hours and booking tickets in advance before visiting Kylemore Abbey is recommended.
Do you believe there’s something in that lake, or is it just Connemara wind playing tricks on the water? Let us know in the comments below.
Sources consulted for the historical details in this post include the Book Notice referencing Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill’s chapter “The Irish Benedictine Nuns: From Ypres to Kylemore,” The Past: The Organ of the Uí Cinsealaigh Historical Society*, No. 26 (2005), pp. 136–137; Kylemore Abbey’s official history pages on Mitchell and Margaret Henry, the Duke and Duchess of Manchester, Benedictine history, and Irish folklore legends of Kylemore; Wikipedia’s entry on Kylemore Abbey; Spirited Isle’s Kylemore Abbey listing for the White Horse legend; and the official Kylemore Abbey tickets and visitor information page for current visiting details.
