Mitchell Henry

The Castle was built by Mitchell and Margaret Henry from 1867  to 1871. Before the arrival of the Henry’s, Connemara was a popular destination for hunting and fishing and Mitchell Henry became one of the growing number of Irish and English gentlemen who visited Connemara during the fishing season.

Tradition has it that the couple visited Connemara while on their honeymoon and were enchanted by the beauty of the landscape. It was the couple’s wish someday to own a home there and it is said that during those visits, the Henry’s rented Kylemore Lodge, the original building on the site where they later built Kylemore Castle.

Mitchell Henry

On the death of his father, a Manchester cotton merchant, and on receipt of a sizeable inheritance, Mitchell chose to abandon his career in medicine and turned to business and politics. He used the money to buy Kylemore Lodge and construct the magnificent Castle, complete with gardens, walks and woodlands which eventually covered 13,000 acres of land at a cost of little over £18,000.

The Kylemore Estate, like the rest of Connemara, was made up of mountain, lakes and bog. In keeping with his policy of improvement and advancement, Henry began reclaiming bogland almost immediately and encouraged his tenants to do likewise.

Forty years under the guiding hand of Mitchell Henry, turned thousands of acres of waste land into the productive Kylemore Estate. He developed the Kylemore Estate as a commercial and political experiment and the result brought material and social benefits to the entire region and left a lasting impression on the landscape and on the memory of the local people.

Mitchell Henry introduced many improvements for the locals who were recovering from the Great Irish Famine, providing work, shelter and later a school for his workers children. He represented Galway in the House of Commons for 14 years and whilst tragedy struck with the sudden death of his wife in 1874 and later his daughter, Mitchell Henry gave the tenants at Kylemore a landlord hard to be equalled not just in Connemara but throughout Ireland.