Waterford Castle is a historic house on Little Island in

Waterford "Waterford remains the untaken city" , mapsize = 220px , pushpin_map = Ireland#Europe , pushpin_map_caption = Location within Ireland##Location within Europe , pushpin_relief = 1 , coordinates ...

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...

. The house was owned by a branch of the

Fitzgerald The FitzGerald/FitzMaurice Dynasty is a noble and aristocratic dynasty of Cambro-Norman, Anglo-Norman and later Hiberno-Norman origin. They have been peers of Ireland since at least the 13th century, and are described in the Annals of the ...

family for hundreds of years, but was developed into a hotel in the 1980s.

Earlier castle

The original Fitzgerald castle was probably a tower-house or fortified house and was described as ''a square building with battlements erected in the 16th century, with a pointed doorway and a window flanked by a stone head''. The branch of the Fitzgerald family that owned Waterford Castle were the descendants of Patrick Fitzgerald, son of the ''de jure'' 6th

Earl of Kildare Earl () is a rank of the nobility in the United Kingdom. The title originates in the Old English word ''eorl'', meaning "a man of noble birth or rank". The word is cognate with the Scandinavian form ''jarl'', and meant "chieftain", particular ...

Current house

The current castle is a Gothic-style house built in 1895 for Gerald Purcell-Fitzgerald (1865-1946) which incorporates the fabric of an earlier (pre-1845) house, and parts of the medieval (pre-1645) tower-house. The designs were prepared by Romayne Walker and supervised by Albert Murrary (1849 - 1924). The construction is in unrefined rubble stone with fine cut-stone quoins and window frames and topped with Irish-style battlements.

References

External links

Entry on the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
{{Historic Irish houses , state=collapsed County Waterford Historic Houses in County Waterford