Anon.
Castle Bernard, Co. Cork
c.1855
2011/71.1
This anonymous landscape painting shows cattle watering at the River Bandon below the castellated pile of Castle Bernard.
In the 1790s Michael Shanahan designed a classical house for Francis Bernard, 1st Earl of Bandon, incorporating an earlier 1720s house and an even earlier seventeenth-century tower-house. Completed in 1802, this classical building was, in turn, given a Gothic veneer – by whom is not recorded – between 1836 and 1855. As Frank Keohane notes in his Buildings of Ireland volume on Cork, the west wing incorporating the old tower-house, ‘was enlarged, heightened and made more convincingly castle-like with tall battlemented parapets and the occasional bartizan’. This is the building shown in the painting.
On the night of 21 June 1921, Castle Bernard was burned by local units of the IRA. Destroyed with the house was a collection of paintings, furniture, silver and a substantial library. As Mary Gaussen, niece of the 4th Earl of Bandon, observed when she visited just a few days later, ‘all one can do is to wander across the mass of debris in those precious rooms’. The battlemented ruins of the house remain today an eye-catching edifice on the ridge above the river.
