Overview
Red Rum, the only horse to win the Grand National three times, was bred here at Rossenarra Stud in 1965 by Martyn McEnery. That is the real reason to slow down on the R736 near Kilmoganny, because the house itself is a private home and you will only ever see it from the road – a five-bay, three-storey country house sitting above the verge behind its surviving estate railings. Ten minutes at the lay-by is about right.
From clan stronghold to country house
The site was a stronghold of the Walsh of the Mountains, the Gaelic clan who held this corner of south Kilkenny. The older names for it – Castlehale, Castle Hoel, Castlehowel – belong to the tower house that stood here before the present building; it was besieged during the Cromwellian campaigns around 1650, and human remains later turned up during 19th-century road works through the demesne.
Between 1819 and 1824 the landowner William Morris-Reade rebuilt the site as a country house. The estate ran to some 7,000 acres at its height, but bankruptcy proceedings in 1850 and 1852, during the Great Hunger, broke it up. By around 1901–1903 the McEnery family, long the tenants, bought the house and roughly 1,000 remaining acres.
The Hoban question
Local lore, and the Buildings of Ireland register following it, gives the design to James Hoban – the Kilkenny man who went on to design the White House. It’s a good story, and it may not be true: the attribution rests on tradition rather than any record, and some historians point instead to George R. Paine or Miles Kearney. What isn’t in doubt is the shape of the thing – symmetrical, three storeys over a basement, an Ionic portico over the door and a Regency slate roof. A restoration in the late twentieth century pulled it back from years of neglect.
Lavery, Condon and a few famous guests
Sir John Lavery, one of Ireland’s best-known portrait painters, spent his last years here, cared for by his stepdaughter Alice McEnery until his death in January 1941. Thirty years on the American novelist Richard Condon – author of The Manchurian Candidate and Prizzi’s Honor – rented Rossenarra from 1971 to 1980 and wrote a memoir about the move, And Then We Moved to Rossenarra. He had visitors: Mick Jagger and Frank Sinatra both passed through. The businessman Walter Griffith and his wife Christine restored the house after him.
Seeing it
There is no interior access – people live here. From the road you get the symmetrical front, the portico and the iron railings, and on a clear night locals say you can pick out Stradbally in Co Laois from the front of the house. A lay-by at the demesne entrance gives you somewhere to pull in, though the entrance was noted as overgrown a decade back, so don’t expect a tended gateway. Dogs are fine on the road and the lay-by, but the demesne is private.
Nearby heritage stops
Rossenarra sits in a dense cluster of Kilkenny’s medieval sites, so it pairs easily with a bigger day out:
- Jerpoint Abbey – a 12th-century Cistercian abbey in a quiet valley, with the best carved cloister figures in the country.
- Kells Priory – a walled Augustinian priory, huge and free to wander.
- Aghaviller – a 12th-century round tower and church.
- Mount Juliet – a former estate now run as a golf and spa hotel, if you want lunch with a roof over it.
If the Hoban story is what hooks you, the James Hoban Memorial near Callan, on the Kilkenny–Cashel road, marks his birthplace and makes the natural second stop.