North Kerry’s 18th-Century Historic Houses: Architectural & Landscape Treasures seminar, Friday 9th October 2026, Kerry Writers’ Museum, Listowel, County Kerry

On Friday 9 October 2026, the Irish Georgian Society and Kerry County Council came together at Kerry Writers’ Museum on The Square in Listowel for a full-day seminar dedicated to the country houses and designed landscapes of North Kerry. Free to attend and forming part of Kerry County Council’s Architecture Kerry Festival 2026, the full capacity seminar brought together historians, architects and heritage professionals to examine a remarkable and often overlooked part of Ireland’s built heritage.

North Kerry’s historic cultural landscape is exceptionally rich, encompassing everything from the modest homes of minor gentry to the mansion house of the Earl of Kerry, Lord Fitzmaurice. The seminar set out to explore the legacy of these houses and their landscapes, to raise awareness of their importance among the public and key stakeholders, to consider how these cultural assets might be better valued and used, and to highlight the threats they face in the 21st century.

The seminar also formed an action of the Irish Georgian Society’s Conservation Education Programme, which is overseen by Emmeline Henderson, Assistant Director & Conservation Manager at the Irish Georgian Society.

The Programme

The seminar was officially launched by Kerry County Council’s Leas-Chathaoirleach, Councillor Jimmy Maloney, who spoke about the fragility of North Kerry’s historic houses and designed landscapes. He observed that we cannot protect what we do not understand and therefore commended Kerry County Council for its Architecture Kerry Festival and in particular Kerry County Council’s Architectural Conservation Officer and Heritage Officer, Dr Victoria McCarthy for both initiating the festival nine years ago, and her annually stewardship of the festival thereafter, and for devising the programme for the North Kerry’s 18^th Century Historic Houses seminar. Furthermore Leas-Chathaoirleach thanked Kerry County Council’s Senior Executive Planner, Declan O’Malley and his colleague Sorcha Twomey for all they have achieved in delivering Architecture Kerry Festival 2026 and ensuring the realisation of the seminar.

Thereafter nine speakers took the audience from the medieval origins of North Kerry’s great estates through the Georgian era of building and planting, and on to the upheavals of the 20th century and the conservation challenges of today.

Jane O’Hea O’Keeffe — The Big House in Kerry: A Social History
Drawing on oral history, photographs and documentary sources, Jane O’Hea O’Keeffe — co-founder, with her late husband Maurice O’Keeffe, of Irish Life and Lore — charted the rise and decline of some of North Kerry’s best-known estates and the lives of those who lived and worked on them. She paid particular attention to the remarkable women of these houses, whose strength, foresight and hard work left a lasting mark on their localities.

Tom Dillon — The Road to the Big House: Avenues, Trees and Landscape Design in North Kerry
Historian and educator Tom Dillon, twice Kerry County Council’s Historian-in-Residence, examined the avenue as an integral part of the arrival experience at gentry and noble houses. Drawing on North Kerry examples, including the lime avenue at Ballyhorgan (East) House near Lixnaw, he showed how avenue layouts and planting shifted from formal, single-species rows towards more naturalistic compositions — and how many survive today as living monuments, frequently outlasting the houses they once led to.

Kay Caball — Crotta 1669–1920: From Big House to Ruin
Genealogist and local historian Kay Caball, a native of Listowel, traced the story of the Great House at Crotta and the people who lived there — from its beginnings as a Norman Fitzmaurice castle, through the original great house of 1669 and Richard Morrison’s redesign of 1819, to its decline into a derelict ruin by 1921. Among Crotta’s notable occupants were the Ponsonbys, the Galvins of Crotta, and the Kitchener family of Horatio, later Earl Kitchener of Khartoum.

Dr Declan Downey — Between the Woods and the Waters: Tarbert House & Demesne, from 1698 to 1798
Dr Declan M. Downey of University College Dublin explored the architecture, décor and landscape of Tarbert House during the first hundred years of its history. Built by the Leslie family as their principal seat between 1698 and 1720 and extended in the 1740s and 1750s, Tarbert is one of Ireland’s few surviving late Stuart–early Georgian houses still owned and lived in by the family who built it.

Professor David Fleming — The Lost Great Garden of Tralee
Professor David Fleming of the University of Limerick told the story of the great garden laid out by Arthur Denny in the early decades of the 18th century. Designed to command views from the Denny seat at Tralee Castle, its scale and ambition reflected Denny’s tastes. The talk examined this rare example of a great garden within a county town, and how the town eventually absorbed it.

Professor Finola O’Kane — The Conservation of Lixnaw’s Historic Landscape — A Blueprint for Ireland’s Future Heritage?
Landscape historian and architect Professor Finola O’Kane of University College Dublin assessed the significance of the historic landscape at Lixnaw alongside Ireland’s other major Baroque landscapes and the towns they generated. She discussed the challenges facing large designed landscapes in Ireland, proposed approaches to protecting and communicating their outstanding universal value, and considered the benefits of identifying and prioritising the country’s greatest landscapes — posing the question of why landscapes of such renowned quality remain so hard to protect.

Dr John Knightly — The Big Houses of North Kerry during the War of Independence and Civil War 1919–1923
Dr John Knightly, head of the World Heritage Unit in the National Monuments Service, examined why some North Kerry houses were destroyed during the revolutionary period while others endured. Six major Big Houses in North Kerry were destroyed in these years, while some thirty more survived; the talk explored the motivations behind destruction and expropriation, the reasons for survival, and how the families concerned responded to — and fared in — the new Ireland.

Dr Erika Hanna — The Earl of Listowel’s Steward and the Social History of Listowel, 1885–1935
Dr Erika Hanna of the University of Bristol presented the life of Paul Sweetnam, steward to the Earl of Listowel from 1885 to 1918, who was central to the daily running of the estate in and around Listowel but found it hard to secure a place in the new political order after independence. His story opened up wider questions about how life changed for those who worked on landed estates through a period of revolution, and how national political change played out locally in disputes over access to land and water.

Professor Terry Dooley (in absentia) — The Irish Land Commission and landscape change in post-independence Kerry, c.1923–94

Professor Terence Dooley, founder and Director of the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates at Maynooth University, addressed the work of the Land Commission in Kerry after independence. He considered its far-reaching effects on country houses and demesnes — including the demolition of houses such as Derryquin Castle (demolished in 1969) and the division of demesne lands to create more economic farms and to resettle congests from west to east.

Chairing the Sessions
Sessions were chaired by Donough Cahill, Executive Director, Irish Georgian Society and Jane Wales, Senior Architectural Advisor at the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH), National Built Heritage Service, whose work includes the Historic Gardens and Designed Landscapes Survey.

Thanks & Acknowledgements
The Irish Georgian Society extends its sincere thanks to the below individuals and bodies who made this seminar possible.

Speakers and chairs

• Our speakers Kay Caball, Tom Dillon, Professor Declan Downey, Professor Terry Dooley, Professor David Fleming, Dr Erika Hanna, Jane O’Hea O’Keeffe, Dr John Knightly and Professor Finola O’Kane, and our chairs Donough Cahill and Jane Wales, for generously sharing their time and expertise.

Funders and supporters

• Kerry County Council, for co-delivering the seminar and for including it in the Architecture Kerry Festival 2026 programme.
• The National Built Heritage Service, Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, for funding the seminar as an Architecture Kerry Festival 2026 project and for supporting the Society’s Conservation Education Programme.
• The Heritage Council, for supporting the Conservation Education Programme through its Heritage Organisation Support Fund 2026.

Professional recognition

• The Irish Planning Institute and the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), for recognising the seminar as continuing professional development for their members.

Venue

• Kerry Writers’ Museum, Listowel, in particular the manager, Cara Trant, cater, Maria, IT technician Shane Batten, and the wider museum team for hosting the seminar.

Finally, our thanks to everyone who attended and took part in the day’s discussions.

Find out more about the Architecture Kerry Festival at architecture.kerrycoco.ie

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The Annual Meeting of the Irish Georgian Society will be held at 6pm on Wednesday 14th October (registration from 5.30pm) and shall include a review of the Society’s activities over the past year, a report on its financial position, and a reception for members to meet and catch up over a glass of wine. The occasion will be marked by the induction of Sir David Davies and Rose Mary Craig into the IGS President’s Circle.

This is a members’ only event and will be held at the City Assembly House, 58 South William Street, D02 X751. Please RSVP by emailing events@igs.ie by Friday 9th October .

The agenda of the 2026 Annual Meeting and the minutes of the 2025 Meeting are available to download through the following links:

IGS ANNUAL MEETING 2026 AGENDA

IGS ANNUAL MEETING 2025 MINUTES

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Thumbs up for Traditional Building Skills: Left to Right: Claire Callaghan, NWRA; Catherine Cullimore, SRA; Shane Nolan, Nolans Conservation; Emmeline Henderson, IGS; Kevin Moran, OPW Minister; Nicola Matthews, NBHS; and Jacqueline Hall, IGS Chairperson at the launch of the skills training day at the Magazine Fort, 21st September 2026.

TRADITIONAL BUILDING SKILLS TRAINING TAKES CENTRE STAGE AT THE MAGAZINE FORT, PHOENIX PARK, MONDAY 21ST SEPTEMBER 2026.

The Irish Georgian Society, Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage's National Built Heritage Service (NBHS) and Office of Public Works (OPW), with support from the Southern Regional Assembly (SRA) and the Northern and Western Regional Assembly (NWRA), bring local authorities and THRIVE design teams together for a day of hands-on conservation training.

Titled ‘Head, Hands and Heart’, the programme was designed for multi-disciplinary teams delivering projects under THRIVE (Town Centre First Heritage Revival Scheme), which is co-funded by the Government of Ireland and the European Union through the ERDF Regional Programmes 2021–27. It combined expert talks with live demonstrations of the crafts used to conserve the fort itself: brick, stone and lime work, historic joinery and window repair, slating and ironwork.

The day was officially launched by Kevin ‘Boxer’ Moran TD, Minister of State with responsibility for the Office of Public Works, following a welcome from Jacqueline Hall, Chairperson of the Irish Georgian Foundation, and Emmeline Henderson, IGS Conservation Manager and Assistant Director.

In her welcome address Emmeline situated the skills training day in the context of the Irish Georgian Society’s sustained commitment to promote the use of traditional materials and methods in the conservation of Ireland’s built heritage. The Society’s dedication to promoting traditional skills is primarily achieved through its key partnerships with Local Authority Architectural Conservation Officers and Heritage Officers throughout Ireland on the delivery of the annual Traditional Building Skills in Action Exhibitions. The Society has held over twenty traditional building skills in action exhibitions throughout the country where the audience is primarily historic house owners, however the Society was delighted to partner with the NBHS, the OPW, and the SRA and NWRA, to deliver a skills training day specifically for Local Authorities and their design teams undertaking the rehabilitation of heritage buildings in receipt of THRIVE funding.

An award-winning setting

The skills training day was further enhanced by the extraordinary venue of the historic Magazine Fort, and the Society wishes to thank both Margaret Gormely, OPW Chief Parks Superintendent and Paul McDonnell, OPW Phoenix Park Superintendent for accommodating the skills training day at the Magazine Fort. Built between 1734 and 1736 to the design of military engineer John Corneille, the Magazine Fort was commissioned by the Duke of Dorset, then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to store and supply gunpowder and ammunition. Its square plan with four demi-bastions and dry moat is a classic example of 18th-century military architecture.

The OPW, which owns the fort, recently completed a two-year stabilisation and restoration project there, including new roofs, window repairs, lime rendering, re-capping and repointing of the outer walls, and restoration of the stone entrance archway, known as the Dorset Arch. The impressive works received the RIAI Conservation Award 2026.

Many of the traditional building skills practitioners who demonstrated at the skills training day in the Magazine Fort were also responsible for undertaking this award-winning work. The Society wishes to thank Bushypark Ironwork, Crannog Roofing, Nolans Conservation and Restoration and Timeless Sash Windows for their engaging traditional ironwork, roofing, brick and lime pointing, and timber sash window restoration demonstrations, respectively. In particular the Society wants to acknowledge Shane Nolan MD of Nolans Conservation and Restoration who co-ordinated the skills demonstration and Nicola Matthews, Senior Architect, National Built Heritage Service, at the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage for driving the skills training day and harnessing the contribution of speakers who were most generous in sharing their expert knowledge of the below subjects:

• Kenny Davy, Kelbuild (main contractor on the Magazine Fort), and Shane Nolan, Nolans Group Conservation & Restoration Ltd. (specialist conservation sub-contractor on the Magazine Fort) – an overview of the Magazine Fort project and the specialist skills it required
• Susan Roundtree, retired conservation architect – looking at brick in historic buildings
• Dr Nessa Roche, Senior Architectural Advisor, NBHS – looking at windows in historic buildings
• Dr Caroline Engel Purcell, OPW – improving energy efficiency in heritage properties, whose paper was presented on the day by Audrey Farrell, Senior Architect, OPW.
• Michael Scott, Architectural Conservation Officer, Galway City Council – traditional building skills and THRIVE
• Nicola Matthews, Senior Conservation Architect, NBHS & National Contact Point for the NEB, and Tom Pollard, Pollard Conservation & Restoration, and until recently the co-ordinator of the All-Ireland Heritage Skills Training Programme – a culture of adaptation and reuse

Site Tours
The skills training day was further augmented by site tours of the Magazine Fort from OPW Senior Architect, Audrey Farrell and OPW Architect, Angela Rueda, who were responsible for the architectural conservation of the Magazine Fort; and the specialist conservation sub-contractor on the Magazine Fort, Shane Nolan, MD of Nolans Conservation and Restoration.

A Legacy for Irish Towns
The training day was requested by Rose Power, Southern Regional Assembly and Patrick Devine, Northern and Western Regional Assembly to promote the use of traditional building skills and materials for the conservation of projects delivered under THRIVE; and to strengthen the values of the New European Bauhaus (NEB) in the delivery of those projects, namely, sustainability, aesthetics (beauty), and inclusion (together). Participating local authorities were invited to consider how similar skills days could be integreated and delivered into their own THRIVE projects and in the process support local economies, the reuse of vacant town-centre buildings and the circular economy.

Acknowledgments
The event formed part of the Society's Conservation Education Programme, which is supported by the National Built Heritage Service and the Society wishes to sincerely thank the NBHS, in particular Sarah Waters, PO for Heritage and Nicola Matthew, Senior Conservation Architect of the NBHS, for their support of the Conservation Education Programme, and the skills training day, as well as The Heritage Council for its broader support of the Society through its Heritage Organisation Fund 2026.

To view photomontages of the traditional skills training days please view the below two PDFs which contain a selection of images taken by John Lalor, National Built Heritage Service, Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage:
Traditional Skills Training Day Photomontage by John Lalor, NBHS, 1.
Traditional Skills Training Day Photomontage by John Lalor, NBHS, 2.

Caption: Paul McDonnell, OPW Phoenix Park Superintendent; Emmeline Henderson, IGS Assistant Director & Conservation Manager; Shane Nolan, MD Nolans Conservation & Restoration Ltd.; Kevin 'Boxer' Moran, TD, Minister of State for the OPW; Jacqueline Hall, IGF Chairperson; and Audrey Farrell, OPW Senior Conservation Architect, OPW.

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The Irish Georgian Society warmly congratulates Mary Nevin for winning the Desmond Guinness Scholarship 2025, which will enable her to progress her research into the Eighteenth-Century chimneypiece industry in Britain and Ireland

The Desmond Guinness Scholarship will facilitate Mary Nevin’s PhD research on the European Research Council Advanced Grant project, STONE-WORK, at Trinity College Dublin. Her study, supervised by Prof. Christine Casey and Dr. Melanie Hayes, examines the eighteenth-century chimneypiece industry in Britain and Ireland. Often constituting the single most expensive unit of architectural and sculpted display in elite interiors, the chimneypiece has generated a conspicuously small historiography. Mary’s research seeks to redress this lacuna by examining material supply networks, authorship, and the role of the artisan, to reconstruct the collaborative and material processes involved in chimneypiece production.

The Desmond Guinness Scholarship will enable Mary to consult archival material at Suffolk Archives, the University of Bristol Library, the British Library, and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. Business records relating to regional stone-working enterprises in eastern England will provide data on commercial practices, extending Mary’s existing analysis of the trade in decorative stone and yielding comparative information regarding commercialisation in the chimneypiece industry. Material associated with the Paty family of Bristol will extend the project’s evidentiary basis for sculptor specialisations, while also providing information pertaining to design and marketability. Family and estate papers connected to the Perceval family of Cork will contribute to knowledge of artisanal networks that underpinned chimneypiece production in the early eighteenth century.

Mary expects that examination of these varied sources will illuminate the breadth and regional diversity of the eighteenth-century chimneypiece industry, advancing understandings of elite acquisition, mercantile networks, and the chimneypiece as a vehicle for emulative self-fashioning in the domestic environment.

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The Irish Georgian Society’s John Maiben Gilmartin Award 2025 was jointly awarded to Dr Deirdre Cullen and Dr Siobhan Osgood with a presentation made last month in the City Assembly House by JM Gilmartin assessor, Professor Finola O’Kane.

The John Maiben Gilmartin Award assessors committee, comprising Dr Fintan Cullen, Dr Conor Lucey and Dr Finola O’Kane, considered the standard of applications in 2025 warranted a joint award. Read more below about the research of the joint-winners Dr Deirdre Cullen and Dr Siobhan Osgood, and the opportunities afforded by the award to pursue their respective archival research.

Dr Deirdre Cullen: Neoclassical sensibilities and the creation of the all’antica painted decorations in the Long Gallery, Castletown House, Co. Kildare.

The John Maiben Gilmartin Award will facilitate Dr Deirdre Cullen’s further research this summer into a key aspect of her recently completed PhD thesis, which examined the neoclassical sensibility behind the creation of the all’antica painted decorations in the Long Gallery of Castletown House, Co. Kildare. Commissioned during the tenure of Thomas and Lady Louisa Conolly, the scheme was executed by the English artist Charles Reuben Ryley in 1775 and 1776. Dr Cullen’s thesis argued that despite its superficial similarity to painted rooms by celebrated architects such as James Stuart, Robert Adam and James Wyatt, the Long Gallery stands apart in the sheer scale and complexity of its iconography, created largely under Louisa Conolly’s direction in an era when women did not typically receive a formal education in the classics. Dr Cullen examined a broad range of materials to shed light on the foundations of Louisa Conolly’s wide-ranging familiarity with the history, mythology, and literature of the classical world, looking at reading material, amateur theatricals, female ‘accomplishments’, Grand Tour correspondence and souvenirs, and the architecture and interiors that formed the backdrop to her life. The John Maiben Gilmartin award will permit Dr Cullen to delve deeper into Louisa’s education and family milieu by focusing on records of her parents, the 2nd Duke and Duchess of Richmond. Their papers in the West Sussex Record Office contain their personal correspondence, household accounts and receipts, and records of the servants in their employ. Dr Cullen expects that examination of these papers will yield new information concerning the family’s thoughts and practices in the upbringing and education of their daughters, before Louisa and her younger sisters moved to Carton, Co. Kildare, in 1751 (after the early deaths of the Duke and Duchess).

Dr Siobhan Osgood: Evolution of engineering draughtsmanship and the Ireland's influence over the creation of the French railway network

The John Maiben Gilmartin Award enabled Dr Siobhan Osgood to visit archives in Paris to expand two aspects of her research. Firstly, into the evolution of engineering draughtsmanship. The technical drawing skill of using shadow projection was a mathematical formula devised by the French military engineer and aide de camp to Napoleon, Gaspard Monge. He published Geometrie Descriptive in 1794 when he was a founding member of the École Polytechnique, and it is their archive which contains his own drawings, teaching syllabus, letters, and drawing portfolios of his students. The second prong of the archival research found original material relating directly to Ireland’s influence over the creation of the railway network in France: the French investigations into creating their own railway network were based on the Irish Railway Commission from 1838. The Archives Nationales and Bibliothèque Nationale contained artefacts from Baptiste Alexis Victor Legrand, Director General of the Department of Ponts et Chaussées who presented a plan to the French government based on the Irish Commissions strategy. One particular highlight from the visit was finding the large-scale model of the Boyne Viaduct, on display at the Musée des Arts et Métiers. It was gifted by the viaduct’s engineer, Sir John Banjamin Macneill, to Prince Napoleon in 1863. During Dr Osgood’s visit she was also able to visit railway stations, including the metro station Place Monge, whose name is also cast into the Eiffel Tower. The outcome will be the publishing of her thesis as a book with a robust evidence-based scrutiny of Franco-Irish railway relations, and the early innovations of Georgian railways in Ireland which led to the Victorian standardisations in railway building.

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It is with great sadness that the Irish Georgian Society has learned of the death of Alec Cobbe, artist, designer, musician and collector. Truly a renaissance man, Alec studied medicine at Oxford and the London Hospital in Whitechapel. Then he retrained as a painting conservator at the Tate Gallery, later working at the Hamilton Kerr Institute and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. His technical knowledge of pigment, and his skilful reading of X-rays (an unexpected synergy from his medical training) allowed for numerous rediscoveries, with particular expertise developed in the art of Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian. Alec was also a successful artist himself, exhibiting widely and was deeply versed in the historic country house interior, working from the 1980s on some of the greatest English houses, including Petworth, Goodwood and Windsor Castle and Irish houses including Castle Coole, Castletown Cox, Castletown House, Dublin Castle, Emo Court, Hillsborough Castle and Russborough. His recently unveiled rehang of Castle Howard has been universally hailed as a triumph. In 2014 a book of a London and Dublin exhibition marked Alec’s donation of his design archive to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Cobbe family owed its fortunes in Ireland to the successful career of Charles Cobbe, who rose through the ranks of the established church to become Archbishop of Dublin. Newbridge, County Dublin – the house built to designs by James Gibbs – remains the family home (though ownership has passed to the local authority. It has been, Alec recalled, ‘the single greatest influence on my life’. The designs by Gibbs for Newbridge were rediscovered by Alec and published with Terry Friedman in ‘James Gibbs in Ireland’ (2006), a volume published in association with the I.G.S.

Recent major projects associated with the house’s architecture and collections included the cataloguing in a wonderful book published by Yale University Press of the Cobbe Cabinet of Curiosities (2014), which had been accumulated there since the eighteenth century. An extraordinary exhibition organised with the O.P.W. at Dublin Castle reunited the ‘peacock’ dinner service. Commissioned from the newly founded Worcester porcelain factory by the archbishop’s daughter-in-law (and Alec’s great x5 grandmother) Lady Betty Cobbe, but sold from Newbridge in 1920, it was acquired back by Alec over decades, piece by piece. His award-winning book, ‘Birds, Bugs and Butterflies: A Biography of an Irish Service of Worcester Porcelain’ was published in 2019.

Earlier the historic picture collection formed by Lady Betty and her husband, Thomas (with the advice of Swift’s friend, the vicar of Donabate, Matthew Pilkington) was the subject of a major exhibition in 2001, together with Alec’s own, always judicious, additions to the collection. Clerics and Connoisseurs at Kenwood House was again supported by the I.G.S. in association with English Heritage.

In addition to his art and design practice, Alec was a talented musician and a leading collector of historic keyboard instruments, chiefly with associations to the great composers, but also charting the development of instrument building in Britain and Ireland. The collection is housed at the Cobbes’ English home, Hatchlands Park in Surrey (leased from the National Trust) where it complements spectacularly the interiors by Robert Adam restored and augmented by Alec over the past forty years.

Alec was a supporter of the I.G.S. for many years, contributing a typically erudite article to our journal on Ferdinand Weber, who had travelled from Saxony to Dublin to work as harpsichord maker for Dublin’s elite, including Lady Betty Cobbe. In 2016 he hosted an I.G.S. conference at Newbridge, featuring a wide range of papers on the house’s architecture, landscape and collections, subjects which he had spent a lifetime researching. His humour, kindness and, perhaps particularly, his infectious enthusiasm will be greatly missed by an immensely wide and diverse circle of friends.

Alec Cobbe is survived by his wife Isabel, née Dillon, and their children, Frances, Tom with his wife Emmanuelle, Rose and Henry, and their grandchildren.

May he rest in peace.

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