1697 – Kilmacurragh House, Co. Wicklow

In 1697, Thomas Action II tore down the ruins of Kilmacurragh abbey ruins and used its stone to build a Queen Anne house designed by Sir William Robinson. One of the first unfortified houses in Wicklow, the house comprised of five panelled reception rooms and eight bedrooms and was then surrounded by a formal Dutch-style landscape park. The original house was two storeys with five bays with single-storey wings added in 1843.

The estate was wiped out financially by a series of death duties. When Thomas Acton died on August 25th, 1908, his 31-year-old nephew, Captain Charles Annesley, took over only to die in The Great War on September 25th, 1915. It then passed to his brother Major Reginald Thomas Ball-Action, who would also die in battle, on May 22nd, 1916. The family had no option but to leave the estate.

The house was empty during most of the 1920s, and was subsequently run as the Kilmacurragh Park Hotel by Charles Budina from Germany. Later the head of the Nazi party in Ireland, Adolf Mahr, would hold his week-long Hitler Youth camps there.

Seriously damaged by fires in 1978 and 1982 and later stripped of most of its fittings, front door and staircase. The house, walled gardens, and arboretum was managed by the Forest and Wildlife Service until the Office of Public Works took over in 1996. Since then, the gardens are maintained, restored and re-planted by the National Botanic Gardens. The house is now a roofless ruin.