Derryquin Castle, demolished country house site in Sneem, County Kerry, Ireland
Derryquin Castle was an 18th-century stone country house in the Parknasilla estate at Sneem, County Kerry, designed by local architect James Franklin Fuller. It had a three-storey main block, a four-storey octagonal tower rising through the centre, and a two-storey, partly curved wing, with battlements and machicolations. It was burnt in 1922 and demolished in 1969.
The Parknasilla estate was bought by Rev. James Bland, an Englishman who came to Ireland in 1692 as chaplain to Henry Sydney, 1st Earl of Romney, the new Lord Lieutenant. The house passed through generations of Blands, several of them High Sheriffs of Kerry, until James Franklin Bland sold it to the Warden family in 1891. The IRA burnt it in 1922 while Colonel Charles Wallace Warden owned it, and it was demolished in 1969.
Sir (Francis) Christopher Bland, a later member of the family, used Derryquin as one of the settings for his novel 'Ashes in the Wind'. The book draws on the estate that his ancestors had owned until 1891.
The site lies within the grounds of the Parknasilla Resort and Spa Hotel, about 40 km south-west of Killarney on the Ring of Kerry. The house was demolished in 1969, so no ruins or remains of it stand; the hotel the Bland family built in the 1890s occupies the estate.
Sir (Francis) Christopher Bland, a later member of the family, used Derryquin as one of the settings for his novel 'Ashes in the Wind'. The book is not a history of the house but a literary work that places the demolished estate in fiction.
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