Strancally Castle stands above a bend in the Blackwater, half an hour’s drive from Youghal, in a stretch of Co Waterford where the river runs wide, and the light is mostly grey. James and George Richard Pain built it around 1830 for John Keily, MP for Clonmel, and set it in front of the ruin of the Desmond castle it replaced, on ground first fortified by Raymond le Gros.
Local legend says the occupants of that older castle once lured the landowners of the district to a banquet and dropped them through a trapdoor into a flooded cave below.
The main house runs to roughly 16,000 square feet; the estate around it came to 5,000 acres in the 1850s, was broken up by the Irish Land Commission, and left family hands with 160 acres attached. And it stands at 440 today.
The house is large enough that one architectural account measured the walk from the kitchen to the dining room, briskly, at four and a half minutes.
On 20 August, The Irish Times reported that Mark Zuckerberg had bought it, while the price was not disclosed. A spokesman said that Mark and his family were “excited to continue caring for this historic home” and looked forward to spending time in Ireland, “where Meta maintains its international headquarters.”
