Abandoned Ireland

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She hasn't left the village since a traumatic stay in London as a young woman at the end of the 1980s. MINARD CASTLE, DINGLE PENINSULA, COUNTY KERRY: 'Constructed in the mid-16th century for the Fitzgerald clan, the structure of this castle was so strong that it withstood four charges being detonated at its corners by Oliver Cromwell's English troops in the 1650s,' Connolly says of this isolated fortress. These plans had been delayed and he was happy for us to carry out investigations and let us come and go as we pleased.

Abandoned Ireland is packed with beautiful, evocative pictures of neglected buildings which now serve as crumbling time capsules of days past. Cairndhu is the epitome of abandonment: its windows are bricked up, the once-elegant ironwork of its wide veranda sorry and rusting. And so at last its eventual abandonment, although to these all-too-familiar tropes are added a dash of the unexpected: Ridley Scott used the house as a film set; and Brownlie herself first encountered Cairndhu as a member of a paranormal investigations group. Bursting with engaging and often surprising details, each haunting photograph is an invitation to immerse yourself in history, and an Ireland long gone.

He has also written for the Telegraph, Evening Standard, Metro and Saga Magazine, and is the author of three books. Merrion Press have done a fantastic job with putting this all together and making the final book possible, no detail has been left out and I wish to thank them for that. Her passion for abandoned buildings and love of photography have led her to appear on several local television shows featuring some of Ireland's lost buildings. He says his descendants continued to live there until it was burned down in 1923 'by opponents of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, as the-then owner Maurice Moore, was pro-Treaty'. Priests came to the house and are recorded to have witnessed the strange occurrences for themselves.

A journalist for more than two decades, Dominic Connolly was for many years Arts Editor of The Mail on Sunday. Photographer Rebecca Brownlie had just left the empty canteen in an old abandoned convent school when she paused to take a picture of the building’s impressive staircase. In the seemingly ruined and mundane she finds diamonds in the rough; her images of the ordinary ephemera of past lives dusty love letters, rusting spectacles, photographs yellowed and curled with age paint the pictures of real people and full lives. There was no other door in, no cupboards that anyone could have been hiding in, it had been completely stripped. I’m just glad I didn’t see this at the time, as the rest of the photo shoot would have been cut short!

They were constructed to house those who were ‘poverty stricken’ and some who were sent there for punishment.

Today, remnants of the country’s heritage can be found in every corner of this fascinating land, from the thinly inhabited west coast to the modern, populated areas of Leinster.The workhouses and prisons in Ireland at that time were suffering from overcrowding, which forced them to offload some of their more troublesome inmates to asylums, which meant that many of the patients did not actually need psychiatric care and were there for living purposes only, but it was against the law to refuse entry to anyone. Fascinating coffee table book full of eerily beautiful photographs of Ireland's forgotten and abandoned places and the history surrounding them.