Four hundred years, one family
Huntington Castle
Laurence Esmonde, an Anglo-Norman knight in the service of the crown, built the tower house in 1625 on the site of a Franciscan friary that the friars had abandoned a few decades earlier. His descendants have lived in it ever since — twelve generations and counting, now under the Esmonde-Robertson name. The house is a working family home that opens to the public most of the year. The gardens are older than the house: the yew walk in particular is reckoned to date from monastic times, which would make it among the oldest planted gardens on the island.
A goddess religion in a Carlow basement
The Fellowship of Isis
In 1976, Olivia Robertson and her brother Lawrence Durdin-Robertson — the rector of the local Church of Ireland parish — founded the Fellowship of Isis at Huntington Castle. It is not a coven and not a cult; it is a polytheistic spiritual federation devoted to the divine feminine, and it now has members and centres in something like ninety countries. The temple itself sits in the vaults beneath the castle, decorated by Olivia (a trained painter and a published mystic) over decades. It is open to visitors as part of the castle tour. People travel from California and Tokyo to see it. The village shop sells them ice cream when they're done.
Where Ireland's oldest waymarked walk lays down its boots
The Wicklow Way
The Wicklow Way runs 127 kilometres south from Marlay Park in Dublin to a finishing post on the bridge in Clonegal. Opened in 1980, it was the first long-distance waymarked trail in Ireland and is still the busiest. Walkers typically take six or seven days. The last day off the hills brings them through Moylisha and Aghowle and over the county line into Carlow, and then there is Main Street, and there is Osborne's, and there is the sign. People cry at it more often than you might expect.
A castle that did not become a ruin
The Esmondes and the village
Most Big Houses in Ireland either burned in the 1920s or fell apart slowly through the 20th century. Huntington did neither. The Esmonde-Robertsons stayed, kept the roof on, opened the doors, raised the children, ran the gardens, founded the religion, did the tours. The village around it shrank as villages do; the castle did not. There is an unusual continuity here for an Irish landscape. Walk the avenue under the lime trees on a damp morning and you can feel it.