This has to be the most bizarre and unusual obelisk in the world. It is to be found outside of Dublin City in Ireland, in County Kildare in what used to be Castletown Estate between Leixlip, Maynooth and Celbridge.
When you mention famine in Ireland everyone defaults to the Great Potato Famine of the 1840’s. Exactly 100 years previously in 1740/41 there was a famine that proportionally killed more people as a percentage of the population than the great famine. A cold and dry period at the tail end of the “little ice age” was experienced all across Europe. Ireland at this time was not as heavily dependent on the potato as a staple food as it would be 100 years later. The harsh winters destroyed milk production, the oat harvest and the potato crop. This triple whammy devastated the peasant farming class.
At the height of this famine Katherine Conolly commissioned works to provide relief to the starving poor. Katherine was the wife of the Speaker of the Irish Parliament, William Conolly. Katherine was a scion of the Conyngham family who live to this day in Slane Castle in County Meath, where Lord Mountcharles puts on the odd music festival.
The Conolly’s and the Conynghams took the soup (becoming Anglicans) during the Williamite Wars and following the defeat of the Jacobites they benefited from land transfers to the winning side. William commissioned the first winged Palladian mansion in Ireland at Castletown Estate. He built a magnificent townhouse in Capel Street in Dublin for the winter parliament season. He also commissioned the construction of the old Dublin Customs House and one of the finest buildings in Dublin, the bi-cameral parliament building today known as Bank of Ireland on College Green.
After William passed away Katherine remained living at Castletown where she also constructed another well known eccentric folly known as the Magnificent Barn. The Conolly Folly is a collection of ascending arches decorated liberally with Pineapples, the mark of extravagance of its day, and topped off with an entirely incongruous Egyptian style obelisk. The whole thing looks like the kind of fantastic building children make with Lego. It rises 42 metres high and can be seen for miles in the flat countryside.
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