Cabra Castle
Cabra Castle ( Irish Caisleán na Cabraí ) is a castle in the village of Cabra in the southwest of County Cavan, Ireland . Today this castle is a luxury hotel. Sometimes the older, now demolished Cabra House across the street was also referred to as Cabra Castle.
Cabra Castle is on the R179 regional road, also known as Carrickmacross Road .
history
The castle was built in the first decade of the 19th century using a mixture of neo- Norman and neo-Gothic architecture. The exterior is more neo-Norman, while the interiors are more neo-Gothic. This building was originally named Cormey Castle or Cormy Castle after the townland where it was built. The builder was the Foster family , a local Protestant "Ascendancy" family. The construction costs, however, drove the Foster family to ruin. So they had to sell it to their wealthier neighbors, the Pratt dynasty, shortly after completion in 1813 . These were Protestants too.
The aristocratic Pratt family at the time lived across the street in Cabra House on the Cabra Estate , the family's large estate. Cabra Estate has been owned by this family since 1699. In 1813 Colonel Joseph Pratt added the new Cormey Castle and a large part of the associated estate to his Cabra Estate. Cormey Castle replaced the original Cabra House as the home of the Pratt family in County Cavan. Around 1820, the Cormey family renamed Castle Cabra Castle.
The ruins of the old Cabra House can be seen on a slight rise near Wishing Well in what is now Dún-a'-Ri Forest Park, formerly part of the Cabra Estate. The forest park is now owned by Coillte , a forest company owned by the Irish government.
Major Mervyn Pratt owned Cabra Castle and the Cabra Estate from 1927 until his death in 1950. The major, however, lived mainly on Enniscoe , another estate that the Pratts had owned since the 1860s. It is located near Crossmolina in County Mayo . The major was followed by his nephew, Tan Sri Dr. Mubin Sheppard , a long-serving, civil servant of the British Colonial Service in Malaysia . He was the last member of the Pratt dynasty to own Cabra Castle. Because of the high maintenance costs for the castle and estate, he sold the castle in 1964 to an Irish Catholic family, the Brennans . They converted the castle into a hotel and it stayed that way until it was sold in 1986 to a Mr Mansour , an older politician and businessman from the Emirate of Abu Dhabi . Mansour closed the hotel to convert it back into a private castle. In the end, however, he did not succeed in the renovation to its former glory.
In 1991 Mansour sold Cabra Castle to the Corscadden family , who run a number of hotels. She renovated the castle and turned it into a four-star luxury hotel. The castle is located near the boundaries of County Cavan, County Monaghan and County Meath . Today Cabra Castle's park is about 40 hectares.
Sources and web links
Coordinates: 53 ° 55 '10.5 " N , 6 ° 47' 8.1" W.