Strokestown launches bid to become heritage attraction

The people of Strokestown, a small rural town in Co Roscommon, are joining forces with the local "Big House" in a bid to transform their community into an internationally-known heritage attraction.

Strokestown House and Famine Museum already attracts 50,000 visitors annually to the town, but Kevin Baird, CEO of the Irish Heritage Trust (IHT), said that what lies outside the walls of the estate could be the key to the area's future.

Built as an estate town in the 1760s, and modelled on the Ringstrasse in Vienna, Strokestown has huge potential, despite pockets of dereliction, he said.

“Architecturally it is amazing,” he said. “It was a formally laid-out estate town with a grand design.

“It is incredible to find something like this in a rural town and what is really good is that essentially it is still intact.”

Minister for Arts and Heritage Heather Humphreys on Thursday visited Strokestown House, where she was briefed on proposals for a partnership between the local community and the estate.

The Minister was there for the opening of the conference Revolutionaries in Their Own Right: Irish Women in War and Revolution, which celebrated the role of women in Ireland’s history.

Mr Baird said the trust had submitted a detailed proposal to Fáilte Ireland on the need to improve facilities in Strokestown Park, but the key to the area's future would require a partnership between the house and people from the town.

Ancestral home

Caroilin Callery, a director of the IHT, whose father Jim bought the Strokestown estate in 1979, said their ancestors lived on the estate as tenants of the notorious landlord Major Denis Mahon, who was assassinated during the Famine.

“The Mahon family owned the estate for over 300 years. Dad’s family were tenants, then he bought it and now the trust is running the estate, so it is back in the hands of the people. The whole thing has gone full circle,” she said.

She said Strokestown was a place of international significance which was attracting the interest of academics across the globe, partly because of its prescribed archive of more than 50,000 documents which her father had discovered in the house.

“But there is tremendous potential yet to be realised,” she said.