The Historic Landscape of Castletown House by Finola O’Kane

An illustrated talk by Finola O’Kane, landscape historian, architect and Professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin

This illustrated lecture will explore the historic character of the demesne landscape of Castletown House in Celbridge, Co. Kildare, touching on its outstanding universal value for all Irish people. It will discuss some of the key people involved in its creation, many of them women. It will outline its wonderful water landscape of cascades, ponds, rivulets and streams leading to the Liffey and its folly landscape of cottages, lodges and other garden buildings (surviving and lost). It will touch upon its extraordinary arboriculture heritage and the conservation of its wonderful avenues, clumps, specimen trees and forêt ornée.

Finola O’Kane is a landscape historian, architect, and Professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin. Her books include Landscape Design in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Mixing Foreign Trees with the Natives (Cork, 2004), Ireland and thePicturesque: Design, Landscape Painting, and Tourism, 1700–1840 (PMC/Yale, 2013) and the recent Landscape Design and Revolution in Ireland and the United States 1688-1815, (PMC/Yale, June, 2023).

Professor O’Kane has also published widely on eighteenth-century Dublin, Irish urban and suburban history, and plantation landscapes, with the co-edited volume Ireland, Slavery and the Caribbean: Interdisciplinary Perspectives published in 2023 by Manchester University Press.

Elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2017, in 2024 she was appointed one of six Senior Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks by the Trustees of Harvard University for 2024-2027 and is currently also a Visiting Fellow at the School of History and Archives, TCD.

The 2026 talks’ series at Castletown House is dedicated to the memory of the late Jeanne Meldon and is presented by the Office of Public Works (OPW) in association with The Castletown Foundation.