Overview
Belmore House is a Georgian hunting lodge above the River Nore, less than 3.2 km from Thomastown and its train station, reached up a sweeping lime tree avenue. It was built around 1790 for the 1st Earl of Belmore and designed by Sir Richard Morrison, one of the busiest country-house architects of his day. The house itself is a private home and not open inside, so the reason to come is the ground it sits near: Newtown Jerpoint, a medieval town that has all but vanished into the fields.
The house
Morrison’s lodge is a detached, four-bay, two-storey building under a pitched slate roof, with timber sash windows and a Classically detailed porch, and it still keeps much of its original fabric. The land was leased from the Hunt family, whose later interest in the buried town first drew attention to the scale of what lay beyond the garden wall. You can admire the exterior and the parkland, but the interior is not part of any visit.
Newtown Jerpoint and the church ruins
This is the part worth your time. Newtown Jerpoint was a thriving medieval town that grew up around a bridge over the Nore, with roughly 27 dwellings, a courthouse, a mill, a tannery, a brewery and the Church of St Nicholas. When the road shifted and the toll bridge was lost, the town slowly emptied, and today it survives as faint outlines of burgage plots, the church and its graveyard.
In the churchyard lies the site’s headline: an early 14th-century slab effigy of a cleric. Local folklore claims this marks the resting place of St Nicholas of Myra, the bishop who became Father Christmas, supposedly carried here by returning crusaders. Historians take the more sober view that the carving is a local priest, but the legend has given Newtown Jerpoint a small, enduring claim to fame. The church had ivy cleared and its structure stabilised in 2012–2013, with support from the Heritage Council of Ireland, so the ruins you walk through have been deliberately held in place rather than left to slide.
Visiting Jerpoint Park
The town is reached through Jerpoint Park, the O’Connell family’s working operation, which runs broadly from April to October. Guided heritage walks bring the layout of the lost town to life, and there are sheepdog demonstrations and tea rooms serving scones. Nature walks thread among old oaks, chestnuts, limes and beeches on the grounds. Specific opening times shift through the season, so confirm before travelling, especially at the shoulders of the year.
Exploring further
A visit pairs well with the bigger medieval sites nearby. Jerpoint Abbey has the finest Cistercian stonework in the county and a cloister carved with figures, and it makes the obvious next stop. For a riverside lunch, Inistioge sits a short drive away on its arched bridge. Kells Priory and the round tower at Aghaviller round out a day given over to ruins, and the Mount Juliet Estate is close if you want golf or longer walks.
If you can, book onto a guided heritage walk rather than wandering the plots alone: the bumps in the grass mean little without someone to read them, and the St Nicholas effigy is easy to miss otherwise.