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Russborough House and its impressive art collection (May-Sept daily 10.30am-5.30pm; April & Oct Sun & bank holidays 10.30am-5.30pm; 45min tour; GBP4/?5.08) in west Wicklow ranks alongside Powerscourt House and the monastic site at Glendalough as a great cultural landmark. Designed, like Powerscourt, by the German architect Richard Castle (with the assistance of Francis Bindon), Russborough is one of the jewels of the Pale. A classic Palladian structure whose central block is linked to two wings with curving arms, its design was subsequently repeated throughout Ireland, as a result of Castle's influence and its own suitability as a kind of glorified farmhouse. In Russborough's case, it's very glorified indeed. The house was constructed for Joseph Leeson, son of a rich Dublin brewer and MP for Rathcormack in the days of the semi-independent Irish parliament: he was created Lord Russborough in 1756. Russborough House epitomizes the great flowering of Anglo-Irish confidence before the Act of Union deprived Ireland of its parliament, much of its trade and its high society (thereafter, the rich Anglo-Irish spent much of the year in London). No expense was spared. Not only were the fashionable architects of the day employed, but the plasterers, the Francini brothers, were also of the best. The plaster ovals in the drawing room, for instance, were made to order to fit the four Joseph Vernet marine paintings that still occupy them. The lake in front of Russborough provides the house with an idiomatically eighteenth-century prospect. The impression is a false one, however - it's actually a thoroughly twentieth-century reservoir, created by damming the Liffey, which provides Dublin with twenty million gallons of water a day.
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