The Mageough Home for Aged Females, commonly known as the Mageough , is a 19th-century retirement home in

Rathmines Rathmines () is an affluent inner suburb on the Southside of Dublin in Ireland. It lies three kilometres south of the city centre. It begins at the southern side of the Grand Canal and stretches along the Rathmines Road as far as Rathgar to t ...

, southern

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of th ...

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...

History

The Mageough Home was built by the bequest of Miss Elizabeth Mageough, who died in 1869 and left much of her money to fund "a suitable place for elderly ladies of the

Protestant Protestantism is a Christian denomination, branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Reformation, Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century agai ...

faith to live." The home was built by to the designs of James Rawson Carroll on land purchased from William Cowper-Temple, 1st Baron Mount Temple. The site was known locally as "The Bloody Fields"; 2,000 Catholic and Royalist troops had been killed by Roundheads and buried there during the

Irish Confederate Wars The Irish Confederate Wars, also called the Eleven Years' War (from ga, Cogadh na hAon-déag mBliana), took place in Ireland between 1641 and 1653. It was the Irish theatre of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a series of civil wars in the kin ...

. The first residents moved in November 1878. They were required to be "of good character and sobriety." In 1883, Rev. Benjamin Gibson was chaplain, Richard J. Leeper was registrar and a Mrs Le Breton Simmons was lady superintendent. It is still run today as a residential complex for older people with 36 small homes.

Structure

The complex is built of

red brick A brick is a type of block used to build walls, pavements and other elements in masonry construction. Properly, the term ''brick'' denotes a block composed of dried clay, but is now also used informally to denote other chemically cured cons ...

and

slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic rock. ...

in a

Gothic Revival Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic, neo-Gothic, or Gothick) is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. The movement gained momentum and expanded in the first half of the 19th century, as increasingly ...

style. Thirty-nine houses, an

infirmary Infirmary may refer to: *Historically, a hospital, especially a small hospital *A first aid room in a school, prison, or other institution *A dispensary (an office that dispenses medications) *A clinic A clinic (or outpatient clinic or ambu ...

and a

Church of Ireland The Church of Ireland ( ga, Eaglais na hÉireann, ; sco, label= Ulster-Scots, Kirk o Airlann, ) is a Christian church in Ireland and an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion. It is organised on an all-Ireland basis and is the second ...

chapel surround a central green. The houses, chapel, infirmary,

gate lodge A gatekeeper's lodge or gate lodge is a small, often decorative building, situated at the entrance to the estate of a mansion or country house. Originally intended as the office and accommodation for a gatekeeper who was employed by the landown ...

, stone boundary walls, gate piers and gates are all protected structures.

References

External links

*{{Official site, https://mageough.ie/ Housing for the elderly Rathmines 1878 establishments in Ireland Residential buildings completed in 1878