Stunning drone footage of Castle Gore ruins in Ireland

The end for Castle Gore came September 3, 1921, when a band of masked and armed men surrounded the house with the intention of burning it down. The caretaker said that sixteen men arrived at the door of the castle at 2 o’clock in the morning. When he answered the door, he was faced by a number of revolvers and placed under guard. The masked men proceeded to saturate the building with petrol and paraffin oil which ignited quickly. In a few moments the mansion was a mass of flames and by day break was in ruins.

A newspaper report from the time said that the castle contained very valuable antiques and oil paintings. There were 350 paintings supposedly lost in the fire and the damage to the house was estimated at £100,000. Later the same month a claim for compensation in the amount of £30,000 was lodged with the Provisional Government by the Earl of Arran for ‘deconstruction of premises’ at Castle Gore. Given the low amount of compensation sought, possibly a lot of paintings and items from Castle Gore had been removed to England for safe keeping. This was a decision taken by many landlords at the time as they were all too well aware of the threat posed of having their houses in Ireland burnt down.

As Castle Gore was let out on occasion and with the small amount of time the Earl spent there, I would imagine that the majority of personal effects and valuable items left the mansion in Crossmolina long before the fire occurred in 1921. The house continues to stand in the landscape but its gaunt walls bear little resemblance to the house that existed before 1921. The ancient Deel Castle, the Castle Gore ruins and the estate lands were eventually sold to the Land Commission who divided them up among former tenants of the estate. The Earls of Arran maybe gone from County Mayo but the estate did have a connection with another great house in Ireland. Lady Beit of Russborough House in County Wicklow was the grand daughter of Mabell, Countess of Airlie, who was a daughter of the fifth Earl of Arran, who had grown up at Castle Gore. In more recent times the ruins of the house were to suffer another indignity, when in the 1950s the local authority tried to dynamite the ruin in the interests of public safety. This act of further vandalism on Castle Gore only resulted in one corner being blown off, leaving the truncated hulk that we see today.