Strokestown Park
— a long avenue and a longer memory.
Not only on a wall.
“A Palladian house at the end of a quiet avenue in County Roscommon, the kind of front that looks small from the road and grows as you approach. Inside, the National Famine Museum keeps about 50,000 documents from the famine years, the closest thing Ireland has to a private letter from the Hunger. The walled garden behind the house holds one of the longest herbaceous borders in Ireland. A 165-kilometre walking route begins at the front gate and ends at Dublin's quays. Quietly kept. Both house and memory.
Strokestown Park, 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.
Strokestown Park sits at the end of a wide tree-lined avenue on the western edge of Strokestown, County Roscommon, in the west of Ireland. The Palladian villa was built for Thomas Mahon around 1696, with the central block and wings completed in the 1730s to designs by Richard Castle, the German-born architect also responsible for Powerscourt House and Russborough House in County Wicklow. Strokestown is on the N5 road between Longford and Castlebar; the estate's demesne sits on the limestone plain of Roscommon, with the River Shannon to the east and south and the Curlew Mountains to the north. The Irish Heritage Trust has managed the property since 2015.
The Irish National Famine Museum opened in Strokestown's converted stable yard in 1994, after Jim Callery, who had bought the estate in 1979, found roughly 50,000 documents from the famine years in the property's attics and outbuildings. The Strokestown archive is one of the most complete private records of An Gorta Mór anywhere in Ireland. In 1847 the estate's owner, Major Denis Mahon, paid to ship about 1,490 of his starving tenants to Canada on four vessels; he was assassinated on his way home from a Roscommon meeting that November, in one of the most notorious episodes of the Famine years. The National Famine Way, a 165-kilometre walking and cycling route that retraces the tenants' march to Dublin, begins at the museum's front gate.
The four-acre walled gardens behind the house contain what is generally cited as Ireland's longest herbaceous border, a double-sided perennial planting set against an 18th-century brick wall. The gardens were rescued and replanted from the early 1990s onward and are open from spring through autumn; the border peaks in late June and again in early September, with a quieter showing between. Beyond the wall sit a restored gazebo, a sunken summerhouse, a fern walk, and a pleasure ground laced with old yew. The kitchen garden still grows a working collection of heritage cultivars, supplying the small visitor cafe in the converted stables.