Overview
Belmore House is a Georgian hunting lodge above the River Nore, near Thomastown in County Kilkenny. It was built around 1790 for the 1st Earl of Belmore and designed by Sir Richard Morrison, a busy country-house architect of his day. The house and the archaeological remains beside it are on private land, so this is a page to read rather than a place to walk into. The reason to know it is the ground it sits beside: Newtown Jerpoint, a medieval town that has all but vanished into the fields.
Can you visit Belmore House?
Not as a public attraction. The house is a private home and is not open inside, and the Newtown Jerpoint remains are on private land. Keep entrances and fields clear and do not enter without permission. The Heritage Council’s conservation plan documents the former medieval town and its church, and is the best way to see it from your armchair. For an in-person visit to the area, the separate OPW Jerpoint Abbey is the site to check: confirm current opening on the OPW page before you go.
The house
Morrison’s lodge is a detached, four-bay, two-storey building under a pitched slate roof, with timber sash windows and a Classically detailed porch, and it still keeps much of its original fabric. The land was leased from the Hunt family, whose later interest in the buried town first drew attention to the scale of what lay beyond the garden wall. The interior is not part of any visit.
Newtown Jerpoint and the church ruins
Newtown Jerpoint was a thriving medieval town that grew up around a bridge over the Nore, with roughly 27 dwellings, a courthouse, a mill, a tannery, a brewery and the Church of St Nicholas. When the road shifted and the toll bridge was lost, the town slowly emptied, and today it survives as faint outlines of burgage plots, the church and its graveyard.
In the churchyard lies an early 14th-century slab effigy of a cleric. Local folklore claims this marks the resting place of St Nicholas of Myra, the bishop who became Father Christmas, supposedly carried here by returning crusaders. Historians take the more sober view that the carving is a local priest, but the legend has given Newtown Jerpoint a small, enduring claim to fame. The church had ivy cleared and its structure stabilised in 2012–2013, with support from the Heritage Council of Ireland, so the ruins have been deliberately held in place rather than left to slide.
Exploring further
The area pairs well with other medieval sites nearby. Jerpoint Abbey has Cistercian stonework and a cloister carved with figures, and it is the obvious public visit. For a riverside lunch, Inistioge sits a short drive away on its arched bridge. Kells Priory and the round tower at Aghaviller round out a day given over to ruins, and the Mount Juliet Estate is close if you want golf or longer walks. Check each site’s own page for current opening before you set out.