Galtee Castle County Cork Ireland

New additions by Darbyshire and Smith built on to the front of the existing house between 1893 and 1895, effectively doubled its size to provide a total of six reception rooms and eighteen bedrooms. Darbyshire also added a conical roof the the original octagonal tower. In 1851 some 20,00 acres of land around the Galtees had been purchased by the Irish Land Company. The company=s interest was acquired by Nathaniel Buckley MP, one of its directors, in 1873. Following his death in 1892 it passed to Abel Buckley who began its transformation.

Galtee Castle is situated in County Cork about six miles from Michaelstown and at the base of the Galtee range of mountains. The present buildings occupy the site of a shooting box, built by George, Earl of Kingston, in 1823, and occupy a commanding position at the head of a richly wooded valley. The castle is backed by a deer forest and wild moorland, the buildings are immediately surrounded by pine forests and the view we illustrate looks upon a beautiful valley through which a trout stream gently flows on its way to the river. Galtee Castle is the residence of Mr Abel Buckley JP and has been built of red rubble stone with limestone dressings, both stones having been procured on the estate. The accommodation consists of an entrance-hall, dining and drawing rooms, boudoir, library, gun room and billiard room, with open timber roof and lantern light. The buildings have been erected under one contract by Messrs William brown and Son, of Salford; the joiners= work has been made in England, but the contractors have employed Irish masons and bricklayers, and some of the minor trades have been carried out by Irish labour.. The Castle has been supplied with the electric light by Messrs Drake and Gorman of Westminster who have secured the motive power by utilising a stream flowing through the valley. The whole of the works have been carried out under the superintendence of the architects, Messrs Darbyshire and Smith of Manchester. [Builder 14 September 1895 page 118]

Two views of Galtee Castle were exhibited at the Royal Academy; a perspective by the architects in 1895 and an oil painting "Among the Galtees" by John William Hunt in 1899. Hunt's picture, in which the castle is dwarfed by the the spectacular setting, was painted on site in Sept/Oct 1898. It was sold by Christie's in 1924 (on behalf of Abel Buckley junior) and again in 2000 (The Fuller Collection of Victorian Landscape Watercolours, 7 Apr 2000).

Galtee Castle was put up for auction by the Land Commission in January 1940. While the features and accommodation of the house were highlighted in the auction notice, with only twenty acres attached and wartime scarcities a growing reality there must have been little interest apart from salvage contractors. The successful bidder was Canon Tobin, parish priest of Glanworth, county Cork, who wanted the stone facings and slates for a new church. This was built in 1941‑44 from the designs of J R Boyd Barrett. Only the sandstone was reused, the dressings being precast concrete. Other salvaged materials, including the larch and pitch pine joinery referred to in a contemporary account, must have gone elsewhere. Darbyshire had high praise for his Irish masons (An Architect's Experiences, pp. 170‑71), one of whom, John Joyce of Fermoy, was re‑employed for the 1940 dismantling. See The Irish Catholic (Nov 1944);T he Irish Builder (7 June 1941, 11 Apr 1942, 2 Dec 1944 and 9 Aug 1958). [F. O'Dwyer note 34]

Reference    Builder vol 69. 14 September 1895 page 188 with plan and double page perspective
Reference    Royal Academy  1895, no. 1580;
Reference    The Architect 53, 3 (or 30?) May 1895, page 282
Reference    Academy Architecture vol 8 1895. page 39 - illustration as Builder
Reference    Alfred Darbyshire, An Architect's Experiences: (1897), 169 171; 
Reference    F. O'Dwyer, '"A Noble Pile in the late Tudor Style": Mitchelstown Castle', Irish Arts Review 18 (2002), 39 40,41(illus.). 

Abel Buckley (1835 - 23 December 1908) was a British cotton manufacturer and Liberal politician of Irish descent. He was born in Ashton‑under‑Lyne, Lancashire, the younger son of Abel Buckley and Mary Keehan of Alderdale Lodge. He was educated at Mill Hill School and Owen's College. In 1875 he married Hannah Summers (who died in 1897) and they had one son, also Abel, born in 1876. The Buckley family owned two cotton mills in Ashton: Ryecroft and Oxford Road, and Abel became involved in the business. In 1885 Buckley inherited Ryecroft Hall, Audenshaw, from his uncle, James Smith Buckley, and was to live there for the rest of his life. He subsequently inherited Galtee Castle, near Mitchelstown, County Cork, from Nathaniel Buckley, in 1893. In 1885 Abel Buckley was elected Liberal MP for the newly created Prestwich constituency. In the general election of the following year, however, he was defeated. Apart from his interests in the cotton industry, Buckley was a director and chairman of the Manchester and Liverpool District Banking Company and a justice of the peace. He was a collector of fine art, and a racehorse breeder. He died at Ryecroft Hall on December 23, 1908, aged 73.

Obituary: Mr Abel Buckley, The Times, December 24, 1908, p.9
Biographies of Candidates, The Times, November 26, 1885, p