Kylemore Abbey

Mitchell Henry and his wife Margaret spent part of their honeymoon in Connemara in the 1840s, in the middle of the Famine, and never forgot it. Twenty years later, rich from Manchester textiles and a London medical practice, he bought the valley — 14,000 acres of it, much of it bog — and built her a castle on the shore of the lake: a hundred men, four years, seventy rooms. A few years after it was finished she died on a trip to Egypt, at 45. He brought her body home, buried her in the woods, and built a small Gothic church beside the lake as her memorial. He is buried beside her. The nuns who own the place now arrived fifty years later, from Belgium, having been shelled out of their own abbey in the First World War.

A castle in a famine valley

Mitchell Henry was a London doctor whose family money came from the Manchester textile firm of A. & S. Henry. He married Margaret Vaughan of Quilly House, County Down, around 1850; they spent part of their honeymoon in Connemara, and he came back to fish. When he inherited he bought the Kylemore estate from the Blakes — some 14,000 acres — and built. James Franklin Fuller designed it, helped by Samuel Ussher Roberts, and it took a hundred men four years. Sources disagree on the dates: some give 1863–68, the abbey's own account has construction starting in 1867 and finishing around 1871. Take it as the later 1860s into the early 1870s.

The numbers are worth having. The castle covers about 40,000 square feet and has over seventy rooms, with a principal wall two to three feet thick. The facade is 142 feet across, faced in granite quarried at Dalkey and brought round by sea to Letterfrack, with limestone from Ballinasloe. Inside there were 33 bedrooms, four bathrooms, four sitting rooms, a ballroom, a billiard room, a library, a study, a school room, a smoking room, a gun room, and quarters for the butler, the cook, the housekeeper and the rest.

What that leaves out is where he built it. This is Connemara twenty years after the Famine, which emptied these valleys. Much of the estate was bogland and Henry reclaimed it at substantial expense, planted, and farmed; he provided steady work in a district that had almost none, and he built a school for his tenants' children. He also went into politics, sitting as MP for County Galway from 1871 to 1885. He was not simply a rich Englishman with a folly: he spent forty years and a fortune on a place most of his class had written off.

It ruined him in the end. Keeping up Kylemore and a second estate in Scotland drained his resources; he sold Kylemore in 1903 to William Montagu, 9th Duke of Manchester, and died in November 1910 at Leamington, in Warwickshire, a long way from either.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The Abbey's ground floor

Only the ground floor is open, and the reason is simple: the upstairs is where the Benedictine community lives. What you can see is a sequence of restored rooms — the Welcome Room in the old kitchen scullery, Mitchell Henry's library and study, the drawing room, morning room, dining room, ante room and the gallery saloon hall.

The drawing room holds Margaret's portrait and a recreation of one of her ball dresses from the 1860s. Another room tells the story of the Duke and Duchess of Manchester, who bought the place in 1903 and were forced to sell it because of gambling debts — a detail the abbey does not soften. And a room called The Flight from Ypres handles the nuns' arrival, with a stained glass window and objects the community carried out of Belgium.

The neo-Gothic church

A few minutes along the lakeshore, and it is the most affecting building on the estate. Margaret died on a trip to Egypt — the abbey's own account says dysentery, in 1874; some sources give a fever, and some give 1875. Henry could not bear to leave her buried abroad, brought her home, and started building almost at once. Work ran from 1877 to 1881, to a design by James Franklin Fuller — the same architect as the castle.

It is a cathedral in miniature, in fourteenth-century Gothic, and about a quarter the size you expect from photographs. Two things to look for.

There are no grotesques. Where a Gothic church would carve gargoyles and monsters, Fuller and Henry substituted angels, birds and flowers throughout. It was a memorial to a woman, and Henry would not have devils on it. Once you notice, it changes the whole building.

And the marble is a map of Ireland. The columns use Irish marble from all four provinces: green from Connemara, black from Kilkenny, red from Cork and white from Tyrone. Margaret loved the country; her husband built her a church out of it.

It was built as an Anglican church, re-dedicated as a Catholic one in 1920 when the nuns came, restored by 1995, and is now used for Mass, recitals and choral performances. It is currently undergoing repairs but remains open.

The mausoleum

Further into the woods, a small enclosure behind railings. Margaret is in it. So is Mitchell, who died in 1910, having long since left Kylemore and gone back to England. So, oddly, is a great-grandnephew. It takes five minutes to walk to and most people do not bother, which is a pity: the whole estate is an argument that ends here.

The Victorian Walled Garden

Take the shuttle. Six acres, laid out by the head gardener James Garnier from 1870, and in its day it was compared to Kew — which sounds like estate-agent talk until you hear the numbers: 21 heated glasshouses and 40 gardeners, in Connemara, to supply one house.

A mountain stream splits it in two. The eastern half has the formal flower garden, the glasshouses, the head gardener's house and the bothy; the western half has the vegetable beds, the herbaceous border, fruit trees, a rockery and the herb garden. The walls are Scottish red brick and Irish granite, and the brick is doing a job: it soaks up heat all day and releases it at night, so that espaliered fruit will ripen against it in a climate that should not allow it.

Only pre-1901 plant varieties are grown, which makes it a genuine Victorian garden rather than a Victorian-looking one. The vegetable beds run heritage varieties including things almost nobody grows now — cardoon, salsify. The bedding is changed twice a year.

And then walk to the far end and look at the ground. Two glasshouses have been restored. The other nineteen are brick footprints in the grass, left exactly as they were found. It is the most honest thing at Kylemore: a straight statement of how much was lost and how little could be brought back.

The Head Gardener's House is restored and open, and it overlooks the entire garden, which was not an accident — he could see every man working from his own window. Next to it, the bothy, where the unmarried garden labourers lived, is now a multimedia room using archive photographs to say what their lives were actually like. The two buildings twenty yards apart tell you everything about a Victorian estate.

The garden had collapsed entirely. Restoration began in 1995 under Sister Magdalena FitzGibbon, it opened to the public on 13 October 2000, and it won a Europa Nostra award in 2001.

The nuns, and why they are here

This is the part visitors are most often vague about, and it is a better story than the castle.

The community was founded in Brussels in 1598 by Lady Mary Percy, an English Catholic in exile. It sent a daughter house to Ghent, and Ghent sent one to Ypres, which became an Irish house — the daughters of Irish families went there to be educated and often stayed as nuns. They were in Ypres for well over two centuries.

In 1914 the town was shelled to pieces around them. The nuns were got out by men of the 8th Battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers — a scene the Freeman's Journal later reproduced — evacuated to England, and stayed there until they could find somewhere permanent. They bought Kylemore Castle and moved in on 4 December 1920.

They farmed the estate, and they opened a girls' boarding school in 1923 and a day school for local girls, which for most of a century was the main education available to girls from Renvyle, Letterfrack and the surrounding country. It closed in 2010. Since then the community has built other things in its place: retreats, education programmes, and since 2015 a partnership with the University of Notre Dame, which runs academic programmes here — a Global Centre in a Connemara valley, with about a hundred students at a time. Sir James Galway has given a flute masterclass in the building. Since 2021 there has also been a biodiversity research programme with the University of Galway.

In 2022 the community joined the English Benedictine Congregation, alongside new communities in Sweden and Australia, and in September 2024 Mother Karol O'Connell was elected the twentieth Abbess of Kylemore, for a twelve-year term.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The glasshouse foundations Nineteen of the twenty-one are brick outlines in the grass, deliberately left as found. The most honest thing on the estate.
• The angels instead of gargoyles The memorial church has no grotesques anywhere. Birds, flowers and angels in their place, because of who it was built for.
• The four-province marble Green Connemara, black Kilkenny, red Cork, white Tyrone — the whole island in one small church.
• The Head Gardener's House and the bothy Twenty yards apart, one restored as a home and one as an account of the labourers' lives.
• The mausoleum Five minutes into the woods. Mitchell and Margaret, together, and hardly anyone walks out to it.
• The Flight from Ypres room The nuns' own story, told with what they carried out of Belgium in 1914.
• Cardoon and salsify In the vegetable beds. The garden grows only varieties available before 1901.

Insider tips

Only the ground floor of the Abbey is open, so do not go expecting a house tour on the scale of an English country house — the building is a home, not a museum, and the community lives above your head.

Two hours is the coach-tour allowance and it is not enough. If you are driving, give it three and take the woodland and lakeshore walks, which are included and almost empty.

Winter is underrated here. From 26 October the estate closes an hour earlier, but the light on the lake in low sun is better than anything in August, and you will have the place largely to yourself.

Letterfrack is five minutes away and has the Connemara National Park visitor centre and Diamond Hill, a well-made looped walk with the best view in the region at the top. Clifden is twenty minutes further on and is where to stay.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Kylemore is in open country, so most visitors base themselves in Clifden, twenty minutes west, which has the range of hotels, guesthouses and restaurants; Letterfrack and Leenane are closer and quieter. On the estate itself the Kylemore Kitchen does lunches, and the Garden Tea House out at the walled garden is the better spot in fine weather.

More Irish churches

• Skellig Michael — the other extreme of Irish monasticism: a sixth-century rock in the Atlantic.
• Rock of Cashel — the medieval ecclesiastical capital of Munster, and a cathedral unroofed on purpose.
• Christ Church Cathedral — Dublin's oldest cathedral, and another building rescued by Victorian money.
• St Patrick's Cathedral — the National Cathedral of the Church of Ireland, and Swift's church.

See all the Irish churches in this guide →