County: Kildare Site name: CELBRIDGE: Castletown House
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 07E0200
Author: Maedbh Saunderson, Arch-Tech Ltd.
Site type: Watercourse
Period/Dating: Post Medieval (AD 1600-AD 1750)
ITM: E 697844m, N 734212m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.349070, -6.530429
Castletown House is the largest Palladian country house in Ireland. The Italian architect Alessandro Galilei designed the façade of the main block, emulating the style of the Italian town palace of the 16th century (Caffrey 1990, 3). The latter stages of the project were supervised by the Irish architect Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, who was responsible for the addition of the Palladian colonnades and terminating pavilions (ibid.). For a time the project remained unfinished, until 1758, when the work was renewed under Tom Conolly, grand-nephew of William, and his wife Lady Louisa Lennox, the latter supervising most of the work (ibid., 6). The structural fabric of the building and an early architectural drawing by Thomas Wright (McCarthy 1981, 160–161) both point to the house being an entirely new construction and not incorporating any remains of the earlier medieval castle (Dunne 1998, 7).
Works at Castletown House consisted of the excavation of post-holes for a cast-iron post and steel rail fence. The posts measured c. 0.32m in width, 0.4m in length and 0.6m in depth. Service trenches were also monitored. These are to the west wing of Castletown House, where they extend across the front lawn then further extend down the avenue to run parallel with it. All the trenches monitored are within the confines of fencing, which is also to be covered by this licence. Further service trenches were excavated in the farmyard.
No features or deposits of archaeological interest were identified during the monitoring programme associated with the post-holes. The remnants of a brick-built covered channel were partly exposed in the west wing yard. It was possibly built during 1787, when Louisa Conolly had the Croudaun Stream diverted to flow under new service buildings and emerge north of the Celbridge avenue. The remnants of the covered channel were heavily truncated by preceding service trenches that had been excavated in the west wing yard.
References
Caffery, P. 1990 Castletown. Pamphlet. Castletown Foundation.
Dunne, N. 1998 Archaeological assessment, Castletown Business Park, Celbridge, Co. Kildare.
Mc Carthy, M. 1981 Ireland ancient and modern: the architectural sketches of Thomas Wright of Durham in 1746–7. Connoisseur CCVI(828), pp. 158–61.
32 Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin 2
