Mitchelstown Castle, Former neo-Gothic house site, now a dairy factory, in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland
Mitchelstown Castle was a neo-Gothic house in Mitchelstown, north County Cork, built from 1823 for George, 3rd Earl of Kingston, to designs by James and George Richard Pain. It had 60 principal and 20 minor bedrooms, a 100-foot gallery, three libraries and a dining room seating 100. The house was burned in August 1922; since the 1940s a milk-processing factory has stood on the site.
A fortification was first built here in the 15th century by the White Knights, and the site later passed to the King family through marriage. The Anglo-Irish Earls of Kingston used it as their main seat until it was burned down during the Irish Civil War in 1922.
The castle gave its name to the town's later life: in the 1940s Mitchelstown Co-operative Agricultural Society bought the site and some demesne land and built a milk processing factory there, now owned by Dairygold Co-op. The castle's coat of arms belongs to a local writer and is to be displayed in the town's new public library, which will hold a local-history section on the castle and its owners.
The castle no longer stands: its site is occupied by the Dairygold Co-op milk processing plant, built by Mitchelstown Co-operative Agricultural Society in the 1940s. There are no ruins or walls to walk around, so the location is best viewed from the public street rather than entered.
The castle's coat of arms survives separately from the building: it belongs to a local writer and is to be displayed in Mitchelstown's new public library, which will also hold a local-history section devoted to the castle and its owners.
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