Castle Oliver, Victorian castle in County Limerick, Ireland.
Castle Oliver is a Victorian castle-style country house in County Limerick, built in 1845 to designs by York architect George Fowler Jones in the Scottish Baronial style from local pink sandstone quarried on the estate. Its asymmetrical facade has a gabled block, a central range and a right wing, with a conical-roofed turret near the centre roofline and tall chimneys at either end. Inside are a ballroom, drawing room, library, morning room, dining room and hall with hand-painted ceilings, decorated corbels, stained glass and stencil work.
The present Castle Oliver was commissioned in 1845 by sisters Mary Isabella and Elizabeth Oliver Gascoigne, who inherited the estate after their father Richard Oliver moved to Parlington Hall in Yorkshire. It replaced the earlier Castle Oliver, which stood about a thousand yards to the south-west and was the birthplace of Eliza Oliver, mother of Lola Montez. The new building was designed by York architect George Fowler Jones in the Scottish Baronial style using local pink sandstone quarried on the estate.
The castle was long known as Clonodfoy, a contraction of the Irish Cloch an Otbhaidhigh, 'the stone structure of Otway', after an Anglo-Norman family. The Oliver Gascoigne sisters designed and made the stained glass and back-painted glass panels themselves; Mary Isabella also published a book on wood-turning under a male pseudonym.
Castle Oliver is a private home and not open for regular visits; it opened for guided house tours only from May to September 2014 as part of Limerick City of Culture. The building stands on massive terraces with a commanding view over the former 20,000-acre estate. The interior is reached by stairs, and the wine cellar lies below the main floors.
Beneath the building lies one of Ireland's largest private wine cellars, reached by a spiral staircase that leads deep below the main floors. The cellar holds space for around 55,000 bottles and is a part of the property that most visitors never get to see.
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