Kylemore Abbey
Interesting facts
- The Gothic church at Kylemore uses marble from all four Irish provinces: green Connemara, red Cork, black Kilkenny and grey Armagh.
- Kylemore Castle has about seventy rooms, including 33 bedrooms but only four bathrooms, behind walls up to three feet thick.
- The Victorian walled garden once had 21 heated glasshouses served by about 5,000 feet of hot-water pipes, growing bananas and melons.
- Some forty gardeners worked the six-acre walled garden at its peak, and contemporaries compared it with Kew Gardens in London.
- The nuns trace their community to a house founded in Brussels in 1598 by Lady Mary Percy, moving to Ypres in 1665.
- In 1688 King James II invited the Ypres nuns to Dublin, but after the Battle of the Boyne they returned to Flanders.
- The nuns brought to Kylemore a flag captured by the Irish Brigade at the Battle of Ramillies in 1706, and saved it from a fire in 1959.
- Mitchell Henry, who sat as MP for County Galway from 1871 to 1885, had nine children with Margaret before her death.
- The memorial church, completed in 1881, is often called a cathedral in miniature and is finished with Caen sandstone.
- The nuns' boarding school opened in 1923 and educated girls at the castle until it closed in 2010.
Why it is worth it
Kylemore is the odd one in this list: not a medieval foundation but a Victorian country house that became a monastery by accident of war. Mitchell Henry, a Manchester surgeon who inherited a linen fortune, built the neo-Gothic castle on the shore of Kylemore Lough between 1867 and 1871 as a home for his wife Margaret, after the couple had fallen for the valley on their honeymoon. Granite and limestone were shipped in and cut on site; contemporary accounts put the workforce at over a hundred men for four years, an enormous undertaking for what was, at heart, a private house in one of the remotest corners of Connemara.
Margaret Henry died in 1874, of dysentery contracted on a trip to Egypt, at forty-five. Mitchell never recovered the same enthusiasm for the estate. He built a miniature Gothic Revival church a short walk from the castle as her memorial — modelled, according to the guides who show it, on Norwich Cathedral in miniature — and eventually a mausoleum where both are buried. He sold Kylemore in 1902 to the Duke and Duchess of Manchester, whose tenure ended in a mess of gambling debts, and the house stood empty and half-abandoned by 1914.
Its second life began with a different tragedy. A community of Irish Benedictine nuns had run a school and convent in Ypres since the seventeenth century; the First World War put them in the middle of the front line, and their buildings were shelled in 1914. The nuns escaped with Red Cross help, spent time in England and Wexford, and in 1920 bought the abandoned castle and its ten thousand acres for £45,000. They reopened it as a boarding school and monastery, which is the institution — Benedictine nuns, a working abbey, a Gothic memorial chapel to a marriage rather than a saint — that gives Kylemore its present name and its unusually specific date of foundation.
Good to know
The neo-Gothic church and the walled Victorian garden a short walk from the castle are both original to Mitchell Henry's estate, not later additions — the garden was restored from the 1990s after decades of neglect.
Getting there
64 km from Galway. Ireland West Airport Knock (NOC) is about 81 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Kylemore Abbey is a Benedictine Monastery founded in 1920 on the grounds of Kylemore Castle, in Connemara, County Galway, Ireland. The Abbey was founded for Benedictine nuns who fled Belgium in World War 1. Since 2022, it has belonged to the English Benedictine Congregation. Under The Kylemore Trust, it continues its mission as a Benedictine monastery, holding Kylemore and its spiritual mission, natural and built heritage in trust for the Irish nation. Kylemore Abbey also operates as one of Ireland's leading visitor attractions.
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