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Few places give a better impression of the immense scale on which the Anglo-Irish imagination was able to work than Castletown House (Easter-Sept Mon-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat & Sun 1-6pm; Oct Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm; Nov Sun 1-5pm; GBP3/?3.82; Heritage Card) designed in 1722 for the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, William Conolly , by the Italian Alessandro Galilei. You enter the grounds through the village of Celbridge, around four miles southeast of Maynooth, planned to lend importance to the house itself. Exhibiting the strictest Classicism the house faces out over the Liffey, giving little away except for a rigidly repeated succession of windows. It's the only thing about it that is restrained, though, for Castletown, from the very beginning, was built for show. William Conolly, who commissioned it, was a publican's son from Donegal who - like many others - owed his success to the changed conditions after the Battle of the Boyne, making his fortune by dealing in forfeited estates. Member for Donegal in the Irish parliament since 1692, he was a staunch supporter of the Hanoverian cause and was unanimously elected Speaker of the Irish House of Commons in 1715. In 1717 the ambassador at Florence noted Conolly's intention to bring to Ireland "the best architect in Europe", a move of some significance to national self-esteem. A letter to the famous metaphysician, Bishop Berkeley, states "I am glad for the honour of my country that Mr Conolly has undertaken so magnificent a pile of building. Since this house will be the finest Ireland ever saw, and by your description fit for a Prince, I would have it as it were the epitome of the Kingdom, and all the natural rarities she affords should have a place there." Although plans for the house were magnificent, work proceeded in a haphazard way. The cellar vaults, begun before the design of the house was finalized, still bear little relation to what's above ground, and the house interior remained unfinished - lacking, for instance, a main staircase - until the end of the long life of William's wife, who preferred building follies. The fruits of old Mrs Conolly's imagination are most obvious in the grounds , where what appears to be a 140foot monument to chimney-sweeping closes the vista to the north, while the Wonderful Barn (a bizarre ornamental folly) lies to the east. Both projects were set up to provide relief work for estate workers hard hit by the famine-ridden winter of 1739. Mrs Conolly's sister, for one, disapproved "My sister is building an obleix to answer a vistow from the bake of Castletown house? It will cost her three or four hundred pounds at least, but I believe more. I really wonder how she can dow so much and live as she duse", she wrote of the folly. Incidentally, it seems that the ground on which the obelisk stands did not belong to Castletown, not that this bothered Mrs Conolly. The Wonderful Barn can be visited most weekends, but it's worth phoning ahead to check that someone is there (tel 01/624 5448). Mrs Connolly had no children and the house was inherited in 1752 by her grand-nephew who married Lady Louisa Lennox in 1759 when she was only 15. The interior decoration of the house was the inspiration of Lady Louisa Lennox. The newlyweds might have lived in London (Louisa's brother-in-law described her as wanting "to buy every house she sees"), but the fact that Louisa's elder sister, Lady Emily Kildare, had settled at Carton, close by at Maynooth, decided matters. (The life of the Lennox sisters is vividly chronicled, through their letters and diaries, in Stella Tillyard's novel Aristocrats ). Although little of the furniture at Castletown is original to the house, you can see some of the results of Louisa's efforts. It was she who, with her sister Lady Sarah Bunbury, created the print room on the ground floor, commissioned the Lanfranchini brothers to produce the hall's extraordinary plasterwork and ordered the long gallery at the back of the house, which she considered "the most comfortable room you ever saw, and quite warm; supper at one end, the company at the other, and I am writing in one of the piers at a distance from them all". Apparently, she ordered the magnificent Murano glass chandeliers on a journey to Venice, but when they arrived they were found to clash with the room's blue, Pompeiian-style decor: it was too late to redecorate, so both decor and chandeliers are still there.
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