Five Irish hotels where rain improves the proposition.
By Friday afternoon, the rain has settled in and any plan involving the car has lost its charm. This is when a hotel begins to earn its keep: a hall to get lost in, a spa built around a Japanese stone bath, a library with a bookcase that is not really a bookcase. Five Irish hotels for a weekend the forecast has already planned.
Adare Manor
Look up in the Great Hall and there is a stone man with toothache crouched beneath the Minstrels’ Gallery, one hand pressed to his jaw. The 3rd Earl of Dunraven wanted him taken down. He lost that argument. Downstairs, the Tack Room occupies the old servants’ hall and keeps more than 100 whiskies behind the bar. In the morning, breakfast moves upstairs to the Gallery, all 132 feet of it, with stained glass running along one side.
Cashel Palace
The royal blue on the concierge team’s cuffs is Sue Magnier’s racing colour. There are horses elsewhere too: a jockeys’ weighing room hangs in the residents’ bar, while outside the gardens run towards the Rock of Cashel. The rooms have small larders with local coffee and Tipperary apple juice, a much better idea than another miniature bottle of gin. Then there is Guinness. Richard Guinness worked for Archbishop Arthur Price here and brewed for his household; Price later left Arthur Guinness £100 in his will—a considerable sum in 1752—which helped him establish his first brewery in Leixlip before Dublin followed. The connection is unusually real for something that now has a bar named after it.
Park Hotel Kenmare
There is an Andy Warhol in Kenmare now. Jacqueline Kennedy III (Jackie III) is a 1965/66 screenprint from an edition of 200, and hangs as part of the collection introduced by owners Bryan and Tara Meehan, alongside Sean Scully, Dorothy Cross, Park Seo-Bo and others.
The new Landscape spa is stranger still. Japanese architect Jo Nagasaka has put a warm mineral bath around a great rock brought from Dromgarriff; from the water, a small opening in the wall frames a David Whyte poem cut into another rock beyond. The sauna looks onto Kenmare Bay. A Victorian hotel with a Warhol upstairs and a Japanese stone bath outside is a combination nobody urgently needed to invent.
Ashford Castle
At 8.15 in the morning, Mulligan and Dougal leave reception. The two Irish wolfhounds head into Kinlough Woods with the hotel’s other dogs and whoever has remembered to get out of bed; there is no need to book.
If the weather closes in, Ashford has a 32-seat cinema with red velvet chairs. Beneath the castle, the wine cellar occupies 16th-century tunnels once used by servants and later to store coal when the estate belonged to the Guinness family. Have a Guinness afterwards and leave the grounds until tomorrow. Ashford is very good at bad weather.
Ballyfin
Take the house tour. There is a whispering room, the 10,000-year-old antlers of an extinct Irish elk over the entrance, and a bookcase in the library that opens into the conservatory. In the Gold Room hangs a chandelier that once belonged to Napoleon’s sister. This would already be plenty. Ballyfin also keeps a room of period costumes from the Lyric Opera of Chicago, which guests can borrow for dinner.
By the second night, changing for dinner as a minor 19th-century aristocrat seems perfectly reasonable, and the outside world badly organised.
Sounds: Midnight Wine, for the quieter hours.