Overview
There’s no castle at Derryquin any more. The 19th-century house was burnt by the IRA in 1922 – one of nearly forty Irish country houses lost that way during the period – and the ruins were cleared in 1969. What survives is the walled garden of around 1840, now inside the Parknasilla Resort & Spa estate on the Ring of Kerry, roughly 40 km southwest of Killarney. You reach it on foot via the resort’s Castle Trail.
Go in knowing what’s left: a battlemented garden wall, a ruined pavilion and the footprint of the old house. It’s a short, atmospheric stop rather than a destination in itself, and it works best folded into a longer walk around the Parknasilla grounds.
History
Derryquin was an 18th-century country house, later remodelled, that anchored the Bland family’s Kerry estate. The family’s hold on the land went back to the churchman James Bland, who rose to Dean of Ardfert and acquired the Parknasilla estate; his descendants held it for generations.
The house people remember was designed by the local architect James Franklin Fuller, a relative of the Blands. It was no medieval keep but a Victorian Gothic-revival pile: a three-storey main block with a four-storey octagonal tower rising through the centre and a two-storey, partly curved wing, the whole thing finished with battlements and machicolations to look the part. The pen-and-ink sketch above, drawn around 1870 by William Herbert Stokes, shows it as it stood.
There’s a family thread here too. Letitia Bland, born at Derryquin, married Henry Stokes, the county surveyor of Kerry, and it’s the Stokes line that left the surviving drawing of the house. Generations later the businessman and author Christopher Bland, a descendant, drew on Derryquin’s destruction for his novel Ashes in the Wind.
After the fire of 1922 the shell stood until 1969, when it was demolished and the land eventually became part of the Parknasilla resort.
The walled garden
The walled garden is the real survivor, listed in the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (Reg No 21310005) and dated to about 1840. Its rubble-stone walls, with squared quoins and a castellated parapet, enclose a courtyard, and an attached two-storey pavilion block – lancet-arched, battlemented – now stands as a roofless ruin. A pitch-and-putt course was later laid out within the old garden.
The sheltering walls would have created a warmer pocket than the exposed Kerry coast around it, the kind of micro-climate Victorian gardeners used to push fruit, though what grows there now is down to the resort.
Visiting
The garden and ruins sit on the Parknasilla estate, about 1 km from Sneem on the R568, signposted from the main road. Access is via the resort’s waymarked Castle Trail, part of its network of coastal walking paths; if you’re not staying, check with the resort before setting out, as opening arrangements and any charges for the garden aren’t published and are set by Parknasilla rather than a public body.
For more nearby, the village of Sneem is a few minutes away, the Iron Age drystone ringfort at Staigue Fort is a short drive, and Kenmare sits at the far end of this stretch of the Ring of Kerry.
If you’re staying at Parknasilla, walk the Castle Trail to the garden early in the day, when the light is best on the old battlements and you’ll likely have the ruin to yourself.