Search Results for 'Estates and Landed Society'

Week IV

On the afternoon of March 18 1912, Violet Martin and her friend Tilly Redington, arrived at the door of Tyrone House, the home of the less than ordinary St George family. The three storey house, in the luxurious Palladian style, and said to be sumptuously decorated inside, is dramatically located by the estuary of the Kilcolgan river, about 2 miles distant from Kilcolgan village.

In the decades preceding the 1916 Rising, an extraordinary revolution had already taken place in rural Ireland. The British government had lost its patience with Irish landlords who owned 95 per cent of the land of Ireland (100 percent of county Galway was landlord owned), and had largely squandered their wealth leaving themselves vulnerable to poor harvests, successive seasons of bad weather, and an increasingly impoverished tenantry.