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Withnorecordsto
workfrom,richardand
histeamhadtorely
onexistingruinsand
richard’s childhood
memories. “We studied
the masonry very
carefully internally and
were able to establish
details such as floor
to ceiling heights,”
he says.
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The castle, for example, is heated with a ground
source heat pump, providing warmth to the
underfloor heating on the ground floor and to the
restored cast iron radiators on the upper storeys.
The solid stone walls – up to four feet thick in some
places – provide a massive thermal store and mean
that the heating can go on in the autumn and stay
on continuously until the spring, rather than being
turned on and off every day. Insulating the 464m^2
property was another priority.“Twenty years ago,
when we started the project, there was no breathable
insulation product that we could use to insulate the
walls, although there is now,” says Richard. “Instead
we put very good insulation on the roof and under
thegroundfloor.”renovating the interiors
“A lot of the records of the castle were lost in the
fire, so we had no photographs of the interiors,
but we could build an image of them based on the
shape of the walls and windows,” says Richard, who
decorated in the Regency Gothic style. “When I was
a boy I also gleaned information of where some of
the rooms, such as the kitchen and drawing room,
would have gone.”
Visits to other properties of the same age in
Ireland also provided valuable clues. “I spent a lot of
time getting the details correct,” says Richard. “We
had a couple of false starts with the box windows,
as the detailing and proportions weren’t correct. So