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Buildings at Risk

Road improvement scheme threatens Russborough's parklands

The Irish Georgian Society has written to Kildare County Council in support of a submission on the N81 road improvement scheme made by the Alfred Beit Foundation (ABF). The Society endorsed the ABF recommendation that the road scheme should ‘not impact upon lands currently occupied by Russborough House and Estate’ and its insistence that every effort be made ‘to ensure that the House and Estate, which are of international and national importance from an architectural and historical perspective, are preserved’.

Sitting on a sloping site overlooking the Poulaphouca reservoir within carefully designed and intact historic parklands, Russborough can justifiably be considered one of Ireland’s greatest country houses. Its significance to Ireland’s cultural patrimony lies in a combination of factors each of which is outstanding in its own right: the house, commissioned by Joseph Leeson, later first Earl of Miltown, is one of the architect Richard Castle’s finest commissions; its interiors are decorated with a profusion of decorative plasterwork with works in the saloon of particular note and attributed to the celebrated Lafrancini brothers; two of the finest private collections ever brought together in Ireland, the Miltown collection in the eighteenth century and more recently the Beit collection, have been kept in Russborough; finally, its designed parklands comprise a very rare example in Ireland of a surviving Palladian landscape which retains many of its original features.

Through identifying potential route corridors with a 300 meter width both to the north and south of the demesne, the current proposals being considered by the Kildare National Roads Design Office seem to present a direct threat to the integrity of Russborough and its parklands. The Irish Georgian Society has stated in its submission that any infringement of the demesne wall would have a significant detrimental impact that would forever undermine Russborough’s character. On this basis, the Society endorsed the ABF assertion that there are ‘sufficient lands available to the south of the Russborough Estate (between the boundary walls of the Estate and the Lakes further to the South) to allow a realigned single carriageway route to be provided without impacting upon Russborough Estate...’.

In seeming anticipation of the potential for such unsympathetic development, the World Monuments Fund (WMF) recently selected Russborough for inclusion in its List of 100 Most Endangered Sites. The Irish Georgian Society would have expected that recognition by the WMF of the challenges facing Russborough should have encouraged Kildare and Wicklow County Council’s to seek further protection for the house and its demesne, not seek to compromise them. For this reason the Society has recommended a review of the proposals to ensure that any new road scheme would not impact upon Russborough House and Estate.

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