Dysart
Castle.

Long before the philosophers.

The ground on which Dysart Castle stands — a bend in the valley of the River Nore, ringed by ancient woodland — has been a place of significance since long before George Berkeley was born, or the tower-house itself was built. Archaeological investigation — first carried out in 1989 in association with the University of California, Berkeley (team leader Mark Hall, with Ben Murtagh of the Irish team), and later formalised in Murtagh's Old Kilkenny Review paper — has identified four distinct periods of activity at the site: an early-medieval monastic settlement associated with St Colman (comprising a primary stone church, a graveyard, cross slabs, Romanesque architectural fragments, and the ruins of a round house); a medieval castle phase; a post-medieval phase associated with the Berkeley family; and the modern period.

The Berkeleys of Dysart.

In the seventeenth century the Berkeley family held the estate at Dysart. It was here that George Berkeley was born in 1685 and spent his childhood. He went on to Kilkenny College and then to Trinity College Dublin, took holy orders, and eventually became Bishop of Cloyne. His philosophical work — most famously his doctrine of immaterialism — established him as one of the most consequential figures in early modern philosophy in the English language.

America — and the founding of American higher education.

In 1725 Berkeley proposed founding a college in Bermuda to educate the sons of colonists and Native Americans for the ministry. He secured a royal warrant from King George I and a Parliamentary promise of £20,000. He sailed for America in 1729. Blown off course, he landed in Rhode Island and — while waiting for Parliament's funds, which never came — built Whitehall in Middletown, RI: North America's first Palladian-style house, and soon a centre of Newport intellectual life that inspired the founding of the Redwood Library.

Berkeley's most consequential act on the American continent, however, was what he did when he left. Before sailing home to London in 1731, he made two donations that reshaped American higher education. He gave Whitehall and the greater part of his personal library — then one of the finest private libraries in the Anglophone world — to Yale. That donation is why Yale today has both a Berkeley College and a Berkeley Divinity School. He also made an important gift of books to Harvard. Both universities were, at the time, small colonial institutions; Berkeley's donations profoundly expanded their intellectual reach at the moment they most needed it. It is not an overstatement to call him one of the founding donors of higher education in America.

The California naming.

In 1866, at a meeting on a hillside above San Francisco Bay, the trustees of what was then the College of California picked a name for their new campus. They chose Berkeley, after the philosopher, drawn by the closing line of his verses On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America: "Westward the course of empire takes its way." The city grew up around the campus and took the same name. Neither had any direct historical connection to this quiet corner of Kilkenny woodland. But the name that begins here now belongs to one of the great centres of higher learning in the world.

The long decline, and one man's custodianship.

After the Berkeleys, the estate passed through other hands and, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fell into decline. The tower-house lost its roof. The land was farmed and let go, and farmed again. In 1977, a young Kilkenny painter — then an art teacher, later a co-founder of the Kilkenny Arts Festival and of the Kilkenny Colourists — bought the castle and its surrounding farm. Ramie Leahy has been its custodian ever since. Almost every stone still standing on the site is standing because he chose to keep it there.

The campaign to save it.

The 1988 letter reproduced elsewhere on this page — from Professor R.W. Houghton to the Irish Taoiseach — opens with the observation that Dysart has been in need of state assistance since Éamon de Valera flagged the same issue in the 1930s. In 1989 the UC Berkeley team led the first proper archaeological excavation of the site. In 2003 the Irish Times reported the castle was near collapse. Conservation has continued in fits and starts, with grants from Kilkenny County Council and, most of all, with Ramie's own resources. Structural surveys by Phelim Manning (1999) and David Kelly (2000), and the ongoing engineering supervision of Ivor MacElveen, have kept the ruin from becoming a ruin of a ruin. And now, in July 2026, the whole thing is at risk of being sold — a distressed-debt fund has resurrected an old debt and forced the property to auction on Wednesday 8 July. Full documentation follows in the next section.