Mussenden Temple

A small domed rotunda stands alone on the lip of a basalt cliff above the Atlantic on the north coast of Northern Ireland, and it looks as if it has been set down there by mistake. It was built in the early 1780s for Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol and Church of Ireland Bishop of Derry, a restless traveller and builder remembered simply as the Earl-Bishop. The design, attributed to the architect Michael Shanahan, who went with Hervey on his Italian journeys, follows the circular temples of antiquity: the Earl-Bishop's own notes point to Bramante's Tempietto in Rome, itself a descendant of the round Temple of Vesta at Tivoli.

The building was never a place of worship. It was a library, with bookcases lining the walls and busts set in the dome, and a fire was kept burning in the basement so that the books would stay dry in one of the most exposed spots on the island. Hervey dedicated it to Frideswide Mussenden, a young relative he admired and for whom he meant it as a retreat; gossip about the two circulated at the time, and she died in 1785, before the temple was finished. Around the drum runs a Latin line from Lucretius about the pleasure of watching, from safe ground, a ship labouring in a storm at sea - an inscription that reads rather differently when the waves are breaking directly below the wall.

The temple belonged to the Earl-Bishop's Downhill estate, and the walk to it passes the roofless shell of Downhill House, his great mansion, gutted by fire in 1851 and left open to the sky after its roof came off in 1950. The cliff has been creeping towards the temple for two centuries: carriages once drove all the way round it, and in 1997 the National Trust, which owns the demesne, had the rock face stabilised to keep the building from going over. From the rotunda the view runs west along the long sands of Downhill Strand to Magilligan Point and across Lough Foyle to Inishowen in Donegal, and east past Castlerock towards Portstewart, Portrush and, on a clear day, Fair Head.

Getting there

Mussenden Temple stands on the cliffs of the Downhill Demesne near the village of Castlerock, about 10 km west of Coleraine. The nearest airport is City of Derry Airport (LDY), around 26 km away. Castlerock has its own railway station, the closest one to the estate, which is managed by the National Trust.