Covering some 150 sites, each photographed by Robert O’Byrne, The Irish Aesthete: Buildings of Ireland, Known and Unknown serves as the ideal guide for anyone travelling Ireland in search of our rich architectural heritage. 

Since 2012, Robert O’Byrne’s Irish Aesthete has shed fresh light on Ireland’s architectural inheritance. In this new volume, Buildings of Ireland: Known and Unknown, he turns his discerning eye to a remarkable selection of sites in the care of the Office of Public Works.

 

From celebrated landmarks like Castletown House and the Rock of Cashel to lesser-known ruins tucked down quiet boreens, these pages uncover a country layered with memory: grand houses and fragile abbeys, castles and gardens, round towers and forgotten churches. Some are familiar, many are not – but all are open to be seen, and to be understood anew.

 

With text and sumptuous photographs by O’Byrne, this book offers more than a guide: it is an invitation to travel, to look closely, and to discover the stories held in stone across Ireland.