Esmondes, Grogans, a Gothic Revival
Johnstown Castle
Geoffrey Esmonde, one of the Normans who came in after the 1169 invasion, built the first castle on this ground in the late twelfth century - a plain tower house, no architectural ambition. The Esmondes held it through the medieval period. By the seventeenth century the estate had passed through marriages and confiscations to the Grogan family, and in the 1830s Hamilton Knox Grogan-Morgan hired Daniel Robertson to remake the castle in the Gothic Revival style then fashionable in Ireland. Robertson - the same man who designed the gardens at Powerscourt - turned a workaday country seat into a battlemented, turreted Gothic confection. Work ran from roughly 1836 into the 1870s. In 1945 the estate was handed over to the State in lieu of death duties under the Johnstown Castle Agricultural College Act, and the Department of Agriculture (later Teagasc) used the building as a soils research laboratory for decades. It opened to the public as a heritage site in 2019, managed by the Irish Heritage Trust.
Austin O'Sullivan's life's work
The Irish Agricultural Museum
The museum was the idea of Dr Austin O'Sullivan, a researcher with the Agricultural Institute (now Teagasc) who spent years driving back roads collecting old machinery, hand tools, dairy gear and farmhouse furniture that no one else thought worth keeping. President Patrick Hillery opened the museum in the estate's converted farm buildings in 1979. It has grown to nineteen exhibition spaces and 1,900 square metres of gallery - tractors, carts, threshing machines, creamery equipment, a full Famine exhibition tracing the potato and the emigrations that followed. It is run by the Irish Heritage Trust and got full accredited museum status from the Heritage Council in July 2022. Not glamorous. Genuinely important.
Murrintown House and the rebellion
The 1798 hostelry
Murrintown House, now a private dwelling on the village edge, was in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a hostelry and shop on the mail-coach road south. The Wexford Guide and Directory of 1885 and later parish histories record it as a stopping point used by soldiers during the 1798 rebellion - the year of the Wexford Rising, when much of the county rose against the Crown and the fighting around Vinegar Hill and New Ross marked one of the bloodiest episodes of late Georgian Ireland. The building survives. The story attached to it is local. The 1798 county is everywhere around here.