Grange Castle has been in the Tyrrell family for centuries, although just how many is in some dispute. The family genealogy claims that Sir John Tyrrell built Grange in about 1460, but other possibly more reliable sources say that it came into the family in the early eighteenth century.
Yesterday I set out to find Grange, not always an easy job for someone as direction-challenged as I am who isn't yet fully adjusted to driving on the left. Miraculously, about five minutes out of Edenderry there was a sign pointing down a narrow road: Grange Castle. But when I got to the next T junction there was, typically, no signage at all. Thinking that a castle must logically be built on a hill, I turned right toward the gently sloping fields. A few miles later I reached another junction; still no castle. I re-traced my steps and sure enough, back at the first crossroad, had I just looked to the left I would have seen it through the trees.
Grange is signposted because of recent efforts by a group of local Edenderry people, none of them Tyrrells, to turn the castle into a tourist attraction. The group solicited the support of the current owner of Grange, Hugh Tyrrell, and formed The Tyrrell Trust. Hugh Tyrrell lives in England full time, and is evidently rarely seen here, but he gave his support to the group and a massive fundraising campaign was undertaken. The Tyrrell Trust received hundreds of thousands of euros from the Irish government, anxious during the days of the Celtic Tiger to rescue its crumbling heritage. In addition, the castle itself, although not the lands surrounding it, was given to the state by its previous owner, Bobby Tyrrell, in 1988, so the state had an interest in restoring and maintaining it.
The Trust was quite successful in its efforts: in addition to a fully restored castle, the Trust developed quite a few of the outbuildings, including a re-thatched byre, a small animal barn. They installed a maze walk and hired a full-time gardener to completely revive a walled garden. A new outbuilding was home to plays and other activities, and a tea room was established. Still, by 2003 the Trust was having serious internal difficulties, and it was disbanded soon after that, the 99-year lease that Hugh Tyrrell had granted them void.
Nodlaig had told me that I could easily get to Grange by climbing over the fence, but when I turned into the grassy drive the gate was wide open. A very short drive later I was parked in front of a squat, crenellated tower house, completely intact including the diamond-paned windows. Behind the castle were several outbuildings in serious disrepair and the remnants of many stone walls. The castle itself was attached at one side to a what looked like a nineteenth-century cottage, and here is where I realized something was seriously wrong. The front door to the cottage, near where I had parked, was intact but grown over. At the back, the door was wide open. I cautiously entered the empty space. Clearly the cottage had been recently completely renovated, but vandals had ripped out wiring, pulled the frames from around the doors and moulding from the walls and of course had left trash everywhere.
On my left was a room that had evidently been the office, judging by the two file cabinets. The drawers were open and their contents rifled. Account books were strewn on the floor, and in one corner someone had tossed a large pile of files, apparently having gone through them looking for money. Since the windows as well as the doors had been left open, birds had flown in and made nests amid the rubble.
Across the courtyard, the new building had also been broken into. All that was left were two iron chandeliers taht evidently were too much trouble to take. although the general damage wasn't nearly as bad in here. Only later, as I was driving away, did it occur to me that the buildings had probably been full of furniture, the cabinets full of dishes and the sheds with tools when the thieves broke in.
The rest of the grounds had retreated to their overgrown condition in the very short time that the castle had been left. I found no evidence of the maze, and couldn't even tell which of the walled spaces had held the gardens.
Ironically, it was the castle itself that still intact. Aside from one broken window pane high up on one of the walls, the castle had not been violated. It was still possible to enter the ground floor of the small tower; a venerable iron gate was padlocked against intrusion into the rest of the tower and, given that there was nothing to steal in it, the gate had not been tampered with. Outside the castle a long wood ladder, made in the style of an older era, lay across the grass. Presumably the thieves had dragged the ladder from one of the sheds and climbed the castle walls looking for a way in, but aside from the window nothing was touched.
For someone who has come here looking for clues to her own past, this devastation was heartbreaking. And for a researcher who relies on documentary evidence, the fact that the entire life of the Tyrrell Trust had been ransacked and abandoned to nature left me stunned. For the people who have been here over the long term, I suspect that this current vandalization might be seen as one more occurrence in the long life of this place, a symptom of the failure of the recent plan to resuscitate it, and another chapter in a very long book with no foreseeable end.
