Westport House: A Georgian Palladian Country House in Ireland
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- Ireland
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- Early Modern
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- Domestic
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- Manor House
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History
Westport House is a Georgian country house in Palladian style in Ireland, built mainly during the eighteenth century on the site of the former O’Malley fortress of Cahernamart. The house developed from the estate of Colonel John Browne, whose marriage to Maud Bourke linked the Browne family to Grace O’Malley, the sixteenth-century Gaelic Irish leader associated with maritime power around County Mayo. Its history reflects the political, social, and economic changes that shaped western Ireland from the seventeenth century onward.
From Cahernamart to the Browne estate
Cahernamart was a ruined fortress associated with Clew Bay when Colonel John Browne built the first Browne house there after marrying Maud Bourke. The landscape was then different from today. There was no lake or dam, and the tide reached the walls of the house.
John Browne was a Roman Catholic and a colonel in the Jacobite army during the War of the Two Kings, the late-seventeenth-century Williamite conflict in Ireland between supporters of the Stuart claim to the throne and forces loyal to William III. Browne supplied Jacobite forces with cannonballs and weapons made from iron mined on his lands. After the Jacobite defeat at Aughrim and Limerick in 1691, confiscations reduced his property to the Cahernamart ruin and a few hundred acres.
Browne’s grandson converted to the established Church of Ireland and gradually restored the family’s fortunes. He transformed the former fortress site into the modern Westport House, replaced the village of Cathair-na-Mart with the town of Westport, established a linen industry, and improved the farmland. In 1771 he was created 1st Earl of Altamont, a title within the British and Irish peerage system.
Georgian rebuilding and the creation of the estate landscape
The house was rebuilt and enlarged in the eighteenth century. John Browne, 1st Earl of Altamont, commissioned Richard Cassels to design the east section, built around 1730–1731. Cassels was an eighteenth-century architect associated with major Irish country houses and civic buildings. His Palladian approach used symmetry, proportion, and classical architectural forms derived from the work of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio.
Later changes involved Thomas Ivory and James Wyatt. The south façade bears the date 1778. Wyatt redesigned a dining room in 1781, worked on the gallery and dining-room decoration, and designed a greenhouse in 1796. The Browne family remained associated with Westport House for almost 300 years, expanding the estate through marriage and purchase. This included Jamaican properties inherited through Peter Browne’s marriage to Elizabeth Kelly in 1752.
John Browne, 3rd Earl of Altamont, shaped both the house and its wider surroundings. He created the lake west of the house, planted trees, developed agricultural practices, and commissioned Wyatt to decorate the gallery and dining room. He also laid out principal streets in Westport, established a theatre at the Octagon, and founded the town of Louisburgh. After the Act of Union of 1800, which joined Great Britain and Ireland and took effect in 1801, he became the 1st Marquess of Sligo.
The 2nd Marquess and the Jamaican plantations
Howe Browne, 2nd Marquess of Sligo, inherited the estate in 1809. He commissioned additions and furnishings, including the north and south wings and a library. His interest in antiquity also took him to Mycenae, where he excavated. After attempting to bring antiquities from Greece to Westport, he bribed sailors from a British warship and was sentenced to four months in Newgate Prison.
Howe Browne later served as Governor of Jamaica from 1834 to 1836. During his tenure he oversaw the apprenticeship system and emancipated enslaved people on his family’s Jamaican plantations. He subsequently received compensation from the British government for the loss of enslaved workers. Members of the Browne family had owned Jamaican plantations and enslaved people, and this history complicates the presentation of the 2nd Marquess at Westport House as a “Champion of the Slaves.” That description has been criticized as exaggerated because the family benefited from slavery and the marquess received compensation after emancipation.
Westport House during the Great Famine
During the Great Famine of the 1840s, caused principally by potato blight and accompanied by mass death and emigration, George Browne, 3rd Marquess of Sligo, closed Westport House and spent £50,000 of his own money aiding tenants. He imported food through Westport Quay, subsidized the local workhouse, and petitioned the British government for greater assistance. He also published a pamphlet proposing economic reforms.
Lord John Browne, 4th Marquess of Sligo, worked to restore the reduced and nearly bankrupt estate through agriculture and repaired the house and gardens. Henry Ulick Browne, 5th Marquess, later occupied Westport House after retiring from the Indian Civil Service.
Modern changes and the end of Browne ownership
George Browne, 6th Marquess of Sligo, rebuilt the stable block, installed central heating and electric lighting, added bathrooms, and modernized the interiors. He also created Italianate terraces west of the house, developed a sawmill and salmon hatchery, and planted extensive areas of trees. During the tenure of the 8th Marquess, compulsory acquisition of the town lawns for public housing altered the historic relationship between Westport House and Westport.
In 1960, Denis Browne, 10th Marquess of Sligo, his wife Jose, and their son Jeremy opened the house and estate to visitors. The 11th Marquess and his family later developed it as a major visitor attraction. After Jeremy Browne died in July 2014, the house and estate passed to his five daughters under private legislation enacted in 1993, while the marquessate passed to his first cousin, Sebastian Ulick Browne. The title and the house were therefore separated.
In October 2015, debts secured on the 380-acre estate, but not on the house itself, brought the estate into the National Asset Management Agency for almost €10 million. On 17 January 2017, the five daughters sold Westport House to the Hughes family, ending the Browne family’s centuries-long association with the property. The privately owned estate had received a €1.314 million Heritage Council grant in 2007 for repairs to the house, and the Hughes family later committed to major refurbishment and expansion.
Memories of Grace O’Malley and western Ireland
A bronze statue commemorating Grace O’Malley was unveiled in the grounds in 2003. Commissioned by Lord Altamont and created by Michael Cooper, it honours the Browne family’s ancestor and O’Malley’s role as a powerful sixteenth-century leader. In April 2022, journalist Charlie Bird donated The Soldier, an eight-foot wooden sculpture by Seighean O’Draoi, to Westport House as a gesture of thanks to the local community.
Remains
Westport House is arranged as a three-storey limestone country house over a basement, with its east front facing the town. The principal eighteenth-century work follows Palladian principles of balanced composition and classical proportion. Limestone for the east front was quarried south of the estate. The house stands within an estate landscape containing a lake to the west, gardens, wooded areas, and terraces overlooking the surrounding landscape and Clew Bay.
Main house and interiors
East front and later additions
The east front was built around 1730–1731 for John Browne, 1st Earl of Altamont, to designs by Richard Cassels. Thomas Ivory and James Wyatt later enlarged and altered the building. The south façade carries the date 1778. Wyatt’s work included the redesign of a dining room in 1781, the decoration of the gallery and dining room, and a greenhouse built in 1796.
Wings, courtyard, and library
Benjamin Dean Wyatt designed the north and south wings. The south wing, added in 1819, contained a library that was destroyed by fire around 1826 because of a defect in the heating system. It was rebuilt afterward. The open courtyard was then enclosed, and a new library was created by running a gallery around the inner wall.
The drawing room was reconstructed with a ceiling painted to represent the sky, cornices decorated with Pompeian figures, and a mantelpiece by John Flaxman. The original doors are made from mahogany brought from the Browne family’s Jamaican estates. Original drawings by James Wyatt and his son Benjamin Wyatt are displayed inside the house.
Staircase and collections
George Wilkinson designed a grand Sicilian-marble staircase in 1858 for the 3rd Marquess of Sligo, replacing the 2nd Marquess’s library. Italian workmen made the staircase, whose phosphor-bronze balustrade carries the Browne eagle motif. Skidmore of Coventry produced the castings.
The interiors retain much of the Browne family’s contents, including eighteenth-century Irish silver dish or “potato” rings, Waterford glass, and a library containing many old Irish books. Paintings include works by Sir Joshua Reynolds, William Beechey, John Singleton Copley, James Arthur O’Connor, Chalon, Barrett, Gibson, John Opie, Brooks, and Lavery. The alcove beside the marble staircase contains The Angel of Welcome, a marble sculpture by the American artist Charles Francis Fuller. The 3rd Marquess bought it in Rome in 1862, and the flame on the figure’s forehead represents the Holy Spirit.
Estate structures and archaeological remains
Fortress remains and boathouse
The former O’Malley fortress survives beneath the house in the form of a dungeon and cellar spaces. The estate also contains the remains of an old boathouse open toward the sea. These surviving elements preserve physical evidence of the earlier fortified site beneath the later country house.
Lake, terraces, and agricultural buildings
The lake west of the house was created by the 3rd Earl of Altamont. Later physical development included the enclosure of the central lightwell, an internal open space that brought daylight and ventilation into the building, and the creation of terraces on the west side. The Italianate terraces use landscape and architectural forms inspired by Italian models.
A model farm was built in the demesne during the early nineteenth century. This estate agricultural complex provided accommodation for animals and facilities for storing animal feed. The wider grounds also include gardens and wooded areas associated with the estate’s agricultural and landscape development.
Flags, sculpture, and cultural displays
Westport House preserves the Mayo Legion Flag, brought to Ireland by General Humbert during the 1798 invasion. Humbert’s troops occupied the house. A collection of wax figures commemorates literary, artistic, and musical achievements in western Ireland, including figures representing William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Turlough O’Carolan.
Michael Cooper’s seven-foot-four-inch bronze statue of Grace O’Malley stands in the grounds. It presents her as both seafarer and fighter, with one hand on a tiller and the other on a sword, facing the nearby water. The Soldier, carved from Lebanese cedar by Seighean O’Draoi, is eight feet high. It represents an ancient Irish soldier and draws on Albrecht Dürer’s 1521 depiction of Irish fighters in Europe, as well as traditions concerning dispossessed Irish fighters known as Kerns and Tories.
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