13.08.2020
We are delighted to host two walking tours for members once again, the details are below but just a few things to note in relation to safely attending these tours:
- Individual headset packs will be hired and made available for each person on the tour so that everyone can hear the tour guide while also allowing for 2m physical distancing. Headset packs are disinfected and quarantined for 72 hours by the company after every use.
- Headphones accompanying the packs are new and disposable and so can either be kept or returned to the tour guide. It is also possible for you to use your own personal headphones if you wish to bring those along.
- We encourage people to wear masks if they so wish.
- Please note these are rescheduled tours and numbers are limited so booking early is advised.
- Meeting point will be confirmed on receipt of booking.
Our upcoming tours will be completely outdoors with no visits.
When implementing Health & safety measures in response to COVID-19 on IGS events, our priority is the wellbeing of our guests and our staff.
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10.08.2020
When implementing Health & safety measures in response to COVID-19 throughout the City Assembly House, our priority is the wellbeing of our guests and our staff.
The City Assembly House (CAH) has always had and will continue to have the health & safety of our visitors and staff as a daily priority, however further control measures have been implemented to control and prevent the spread of COVID-19 in line with Government and HSA guidelines. Our staff are committed to implementing these measures according to governmental bodies’ advice which we will continue to monitor, review and act on.
COVID-19 Symptoms
- a fever (high temperature - 38 degrees Celsius or above)
- a cough - this can be any kind of cough, not just dry
- shortness of breath or breathing difficulties
- loss or change to your sense of smell or taste – this means you've noticed you cannot smell or taste anything, or things smell or taste different to normal
Visit HSE for detailed list: https://www2.hse.ie/conditions/coronavirus/symptoms.html
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16.07.2020
Something of a High-Victorian Gothic horror near Keadue, positioned on vast lawns extending down to Lough Meelagh, on ‘one of the most glorious sites for any country house’. It is difficult to deny the sense of overhanging gloom, sadness and grim decay captured in these two drawings, showing the castle in ruins, its plight offering no sense of the sublimity its deeply picturesque setting deserves. Built in at least three stages, there is at its heart an overblown Regency Gothic-Revival castle, known originally as Castle Tenison, now evident only on the south elevation and with just two bays with their Perpendicular windows visible to the left in Nankivell’s more detailed view. Strange for its squareness, its rigidity, and delicate features, nineteenth-century photographs suggest it was a rather unsuccessful effort to re-attire the mediaeval massing of a Castle Rising or Norwich in lithesome Regency detail. Begun in 1813 and completed in 1815, the building was overseen by John Lynn, an English carpenter sent by John Nash to act as clerk of works at Rockingham, eventually becoming the executant architect there after Lord Lorton’s relationship with Nash ended acrimoniously. There is an unmistakable Nash-like quality to Lynn’s castle - confirming the observation made by Thomas Bell, that exposure to Nash ‘transfused into his mind the theory of his profession, and converted him into an architect’. This evident especially in the division of the bays with thin wall buttress rising to finials, the use of distinctive super-mullioned windows and the curious slot-like attic windows which all bear a striking similarity to the expression of the dining room projection on the west front of Nash’s Aqualate Hall, Staffordshire completed in 1809.
Lynn had been recommended by Lord Lorton to Thomas Tenison, the husband of his aunt, Lady Frances King, a daughter of the 1st Earl of Kingston. The new building was completed in the year of Tension’s second marriage in 1815. His son, also Thomas, seems not to have spent much time there, and after his early death in 1843 the property passed to his brother Edward, who renamed it Kilronan in ‘deference to the old associations of the place’. As a younger son Edward King Tenison (1805-78) first pursued a military career, later exchanging it briefly for politics (MP for Leitrim 1847-1852) and in 1838 made an advantageous marriage to Lady Louisa Anson, eldest daughter of Thomas, 1st Earl of Lichfield, Both shared a keen interest in photography and travel, he helping to develop some of its earliest techniques to perfect views of buildings and scenery, while she also enjoyed painting and having travelled in the Holy Land and Egypt, gained a reputation as a travel writer and artist with her publication of Sketches in the East (1846). It seems that on their return to Roscommon in the 1850s after an extended period abroad, they contemplated major works to Kilronan, including by the English architect, antiquary and painter John Chessell Buckler (1793-1894).
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03.07.2020
The Irish Georgian Society offices and the City Assembly House will reopen on Monday 6 July. The safety of our visitors and staff is our paramount concern and is central to our reopening plans. We will be enforcing social distancing measures and limiting the number of visitors to the building at any one time. We are undertaking a number of social distancing measures, details of which are available below.
Hand sanitiser for visitors is provided in the entrance hall and exhibition room.
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