Malahide Castle

On the morning of July 1, 1690, fourteen members of the Talbot clan sat down to breakfast together in the Great Hall at Malahide Castle before heading off to fight in the Battle of the Boyne. By evening, all but one were dead. The Talbots had held this castle for 791 years (from 1185 to 1976), surviving wars, Cromwell’s conquest, and centuries of Irish upheaval, only to be finally undone by inheritance taxes after the death of the last Lord Talbot in 1973. Eight centuries in one house means the last Lord Talbot created botanical gardens filled with Chilean and Australian plants that have no business thriving in Irish rain.

His sister Rose inherited both the debts and the plants, sold the castle to the Irish state in 1976, and relocated to a second Malahide, a family property of the same name in Tasmania that the Talbots had been quietly farming since the 1820s. The family’s private papers, three centuries of correspondence and estate records, now sit in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, a gift Rose made the year after the sale. Legend holds that Puck, a jester who once served the household, still appears in the Great Hall before a Talbot dies, a ghost with excellent timing and, apparently, tenure. Eight hundred years is a long time to hold a house. Losing one, it turns out, takes considerably less.