Lough Muckno
— — a green so old it forgets the year.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest lake in County Monaghan, set in the drumlin country of south Ulster, on the eastern edge of Castleblayney. Nearly nine hundred acres of dark, fish-held water, broken by a scatter of small wooded islands. Hope Castle still stands on the western shore, where the old Blayney estate ran down to the reeds. Coarse anglers come here for the bream and pike, walkers for the lake loop through oak and beech and old planted lime. The light is the northern kind that holds onto the morning, and the water keeps its colour.
Lough Muckno, 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.
Lough Muckno is the largest lake in County Monaghan, covering roughly 365 hectares (about 900 acres) on the eastern edge of the market town of Castleblayney, in the Irish province of Ulster. The shoreline runs through Lough Muckno Leisure Park, a 365-hectare estate of forest, lake and woodland walk formerly attached to the Hope Castle demesne. Castleblayney sits on the N2 road between Dublin and Derry, about 110 kilometres north of Dublin and roughly 25 kilometres south of the border with Northern Ireland. The lake's name comes from the Irish Muc Shnámha, the swim of the pig, recorded in the surrounding parish name well before the town was founded in the early seventeenth century.
Lough Muckno is one of the best-known coarse fishing waters in Ireland, holding strong populations of bream, roach, perch and northern pike. The water carries the dark green of a lowland Irish lake. The colour comes from peat-stained inflows draining the drumlin country to the north, not from glacial silt or limestone meltwater. The lake is fished from bankside stands and small open boats, and Castleblayney has hosted national-class bream festivals on Muckno for decades, drawing competition anglers from across Britain and continental Europe. Pike of double-figure weight are taken from the deeper channels around the lake's larger wooded islands.
Hope Castle stands on the western shore of Lough Muckno, a four-storey Georgian house built by the Blayney family around 1799. The Blayneys were the founders of Castleblayney, granted the surrounding lands in the early seventeenth century. The estate took its later name from the Hope banking family, who bought the demesne in the 1850s and whose name became famous for the Hope Diamond. The house has had many lives since: convent school, hospital, hotel, and a military post during the Irish Civil War. It was badly damaged by fire in 2010, and the 365-hectare grounds now run as public parkland under Monaghan County Council.