Overview
Camlin Castle was a country house near Ballyshannon, between there and Belleek in County Donegal. What survives is its front door: a castellated gateway, a round flag tower and a run of screen wall, built in the late 1830s for a house that was largely demolished in the era of the Erne hydroelectric scheme. The reason it was demolished is the reason to know the place at all. Planners expected the new Assaroe Lake to drown the site, so the house was levelled ahead of the water. The lake did not reach it.
Camlin is not a visitor attraction and no public access is asserted. Read the architectural inventory for photographs and details of the surviving gateway, and leave the former estate entrance and adjoining road clear.
Architecture
The freestanding gateway was designed by John Benjamin Keane (d. 1859), an architect better known for his Catholic churches, and commissioned by John A. Tredennick. Keane also designed alterations to the house. The gateway is Tudor-Revival: medieval military dress on refined masonry, built from snecked and dressed ashlar with a slight batter at the base. The parts worth knowing:
- The carriage arch – Tudor-arched, with chamfered stone reveals, blind triangular motifs in the spandrels and a hoodmoulding over the top.
- The flag tower – a circular tower that dominates the whole composition, crowned with a machicolated parapet on moulded corbels and Irish-style crenellations.
- Defensive detailing – blind loophole openings and circular gun-port motifs at the base and head of the tower, all for show.
- Screen walls – quadrant walls curving out from the gateway, castellated and cut-stone coped.
- The gates – the Saxon-style metal gates are 20th-century replacements for the original timber ones.
History
The Camlin estate came to the Tredennicks in 1718, when William Tredennick, newly arrived in Ireland from Cornwall, took a lease of the land from William ‘Speaker’ Conolly, the Ballyshannon-born politician who had lately acquired the former Folliott lands. The family held on for two centuries, becoming substantial landlords in the parish of Kilbarron with ground on both banks of the Erne. At Griffith’s Valuation in the mid-19th century, Camlin was held in fee by John A. Tredennick and valued at £65. It was Tredennick who, in 1838, had Keane rebuild the house, folding fabric from an earlier 17th-century structure into the new design and laying out the long approach avenue the gateway was built to announce.
The demolition
The end came with the Erne Hydro-Electric Scheme. Through the 1940s and early 1950s the ESB widened and deepened the river and built generating stations at Cliff and Cathaleen’s Fall to bring power and work to south Donegal. Camlin sat in the path of the projected reservoir, or so the calculations said, and rather than gamble on it the house was pulled down. There was no local or national outcry. The scheme was popular, and one more empty landlord’s house counted for little against electricity and jobs.
Then the lake filled and stopped short of the site. The scheme itself still works: the power stations remain part of the lower Erne, and the house simply never needed to be sacrificed to it.
Nearby
- Assaroe Lake and Abbey – the reservoir that spared Camlin, plus the ruins of a medieval abbey near Ballyshannon.
- Cliff Power Station – the other half of the hydro scheme that cost Camlin its house, and a fair primer on the engineering that reshaped the lower Erne.
- Ballyshannon – the nearest town.