Overview
During the 1965 shoot for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a film crew working in the decaying rooms of Kenure House found a Bronze Age bowl on a mantelpiece, still holding cremated human remains. It’s now in the National Museum of Ireland. That’s the kind of place Kenure was by then – a grand house slowly emptying out, used as a film set because nobody else wanted it.
The house itself is gone, demolished in 1978. What’s left is the bit everyone now drives out to Rush to see: a single enormous granite portico, columns and pediment intact, marooned at the top of a 1970s housing estate where the mansion used to stand. It is, frankly, an odd thing to come across, and that’s the appeal.
What it was
The Butlers – Earls and later Dukes of Ormond – held the manor of Rush for centuries. James, the 2nd Duke of Ormond, built the first substantial house here between 1703 and 1713. When he fled to France in 1714 over his support for the Jacobite cause, the estate was confiscated and eventually passed to the Echlin family, and then to the Palmers, who held it for well over a century.
A fire destroyed the original house, and it was rebuilt around 1827. In 1842 the architect George Papworth – who also designed the Dublin bridge now named for Seán Heuston – added the great neoclassical portico that survives. Colonel Roderick Fenwick-Palmer struggled with the rising cost of the place and finally gave up: the contents were auctioned in 1964 and the estate sold to the Land Commission, then handed to Dublin County Council. Unable to find a buyer for a house that was being vandalised and, eventually, set alight, the council demolished it in 1978. Some Rush people protested; the portico, at least, was left standing.
It’s worth knowing what was lost. Kenure’s walled gardens were once reckoned among the largest in Ireland, and contemporaries rated the house, gardens and woodland the equal of Ardgillan or Newbridge House – both of which survive as public parks. Nothing of the formal gardens remains today.
Visiting
Be clear about the scale of it before you go: this is one stone structure in a suburban park, a ten-minute curiosity rather than a half-day out. TripAdvisor ranks it last of the few things to do in Rush, and it is genuinely best treated as a stop on the way to the coast rather than a destination. If you like a good ruin, or a piece of Irish architectural history with a strange afterlife, it earns the detour; if you’re expecting a stately home to tour, you’ll be disappointed.
The grounds are free and open from dawn to dusk, with no gate or ticket, and they’re dog-friendly – there’s a fully fenced off-leash area. The Irish name, Ceann Iubhair, means ‘headland of the yew’. A local cricket ground now occupies part of the old demesne.
Getting there
The simplest approach is to follow signs for St Catherine’s Estate, turn up the road called The Drive, and you’ll see the portico at the top in a green space; you can park at the shop beside it. By public transport, Dublin Bus routes 33, 33X and 33A/33B serve Rush, and the Rush commuter rail station and Malahide DART are each a short bus or taxi ride away – check timetables before setting out.
Pair it with the harbour and beaches in Rush itself, and the portico becomes a five-minute piece of a good north Dublin coastal afternoon rather than a wasted trip.