Glenveagh Castle
— — a castle the glen kept after the people left.
Not only on a wall.
“Seventeen thousand hectares of glen and mountain in the northwest corner of Donegal, with a single stone castle at the head of Lough Veagh. The castle is reached by shuttle from the visitor centre, three and a half kilometres of road that follow the lake. The glen has been quiet for a long time. After the evictions of 1861 the hills emptied; the castle came later, built into the silence. Henry McIlhenny, the last private owner, completed the gift of the estate to Ireland by 1981. The red deer outnumber the visitors most days.
Glenveagh Castle, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Glenveagh Castle stands at the head of Lough Veagh in the Derryveagh Mountains of northwest County Donegal, the largest county in the province of Ulster. It is the centrepiece of Glenveagh National Park, established in 1984 and covering about 17,000 hectares, the second-largest national park in Ireland. The name comes from the Irish Gleann Bheatha, the glen of the birches. The estate sits roughly 24 km northwest of Letterkenny; the castle itself is reached by shuttle bus from the visitor centre, a three-and-a-half-kilometre run along the lake, or on foot by the same road. The park is managed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service.
The castle is a four-storey castellated mansion built between 1867 and 1873 for John George Adair, a wealthy land speculator, to a design by Adair's cousin John Townsend Trench. Its silhouette is Scottish baronial: square keep, round tower, battlemented parapet, set into the lake-shore in grey local granite. Adair did not live to enjoy it. He died in 1885, and his American widow Cornelia Adair completed the gardens. The castle passed through Harvard art historian Arthur Kingsley Porter and then, in 1937, to Henry McIlhenny of Philadelphia, who carried out the interior the visitor sees now: a slow, exact restoration over four decades. McIlhenny gave the building and its grounds to the Irish nation in 1981.
The Derryveagh Evictions of April 1861 emptied the glen. The landlord John George Adair removed 244 tenants from forty-seven households after the killing of his steward; many of the families sailed for Australia. When Adair began building the castle six years later, he built into a depopulated landscape. The quiet of Glenveagh today, the long lake without lakeside houses, the bare slopes of Slieve Snaght rising above the valley, traces directly to that displacement. The herd of red deer reintroduced under McIlhenny now numbers in the hundreds; on a weekday off-season, the visitor walking the three kilometres of lakeside road may pass no one between the visitor centre and the castle gate.