From Cromwellian grant to twenty-year restoration
Killua Castle
Captain Benjamin Chapman, an officer in Cromwell's army, was granted around 1,163 acres at Killua in 1667 as payment for services rendered during the conquest. His descendant, also Sir Benjamin Chapman, built the present house around 1780 — hall, oval drawing room, dining room, the works. Sir Thomas Chapman added the round tower and the rest of the Gothic Revival drama in the 1820s. The Chapmans sold up in 1949 after the death of the 7th Baronet, the building was unroofed, and it sat as a romantic ruin for fifty years. In 1999 the Mexican-Austrian banker Allen Sangines-Krause bought the wreck and spent twenty-one years restoring it as a private home — geothermal heating, solar, wind turbine, the lot. Completed in 2020. Not open to the public. The gates and the grounds are off the L1413 west of the village.
Why a Westmeath baronet became a Welsh schoolmaster
Lawrence of Arabia
Sir Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman was born at Killua in 1846. He married Edith Hamilton in 1873, had four daughters, and settled into the life of an Anglo-Irish landlord. Around 1885 the household discovered he was in love with the daughters' Scottish governess, Sarah Junner. He left his wife, took Sarah's borrowed surname (Lawrence), and lived with her in Wales and then Oxford for the next thirty-four years. They had five surviving sons, the second of whom — Thomas Edward Lawrence, born 1888 — would later ride into Damascus. Thomas Senior succeeded as 7th Baronet in 1914 but, his sons being illegitimate, the title died with him in 1919. The Killua estate passed sideways and was eventually sold. T.E. Lawrence reportedly visited the place once.
A 200-year-old folklore claim, in stone
The Raleigh Obelisk
Standing in the grounds of Killua, near the castle, is an obelisk commissioned in 1810 by Sir Thomas Chapman (the same Sir Thomas who would later add the round tower). It commemorates the legend that Sir Walter Raleigh planted the first potato in Ireland on this estate in 1586. Take this with a grain of salt the size of a potato. Youghal, Co. Cork, claims the same thing with rather more historical evidence behind it; the truth is probably that the potato arrived in Ireland through several ports and several gardens around the same time. But Sir Thomas Chapman believed it enough to put up an obelisk, and the obelisk is still there, two centuries later, quietly arguing with Cork.