Whatever the architecture may hint about rivalry between these Ascendancy county Limerick neighbours , there was in fact intermarriage, interchange of ideas and much socialising.  Economically and socially they were in the same bracket; substantial landowners but not in the first league where estates were over 10,000 acres, estates as well as town houses may be owned in Britain, and sons were automatically expected to enter high politics.  Their often close identification with their locality was not inevitable, but it was from their social level that closest association tended to come.  Their common intellectual interests were less predictable. 

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Thomas Spring Rice and his sister Mary, continued to play Mozart flute sonatas together - Thomas on the flute - long after she had married Sir Aubrey de Vere Hunt in 1807 and moved to Curragh Chase.  A portrait of Thomas hung at Curragh Chase, where it joined a classical frieze decorated with sculpture including a cast of Michaelangelo's Moses and a bust of Newman.  Literature became more prominent in the next generation.  Stephen Sprin Rice had been one of the Apostles at Cambridge, an exclusive intellectual society formed in 1820.  If he had not met Tennyson there he no doubt met him when he stayed with Sir Aubrey's dreamy, poetic son, also Aubrey , at Curragh Chase.  The elder Aubrey had published poems, Stephen Spring Rice also published verse but the young Aubrey, who roamed the extensive grounds at Curragh Chase in a black cape, was a serious poet and an inspiration for his appreciation of Irish landscape and character to writers such as Lady Gregory at the turn of the century.  Tennyson visited for six weeks in 1848 at a time when he was being consistently published but had not yet achieved the great success of "In Memoriam" or the status of poet Laureate.  He demanded that the be left alone for at least half the day, but entertained other guests with charades devised with Aubrey, visited Mount Trenchard, wrote Clara Lady Vere de Vere and at Kilkee found the inspiration for "Break, break, break" .

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Aubrey de Vere was also the source of religious ideas which many in this circle adopted.  He knew John Henry Newman, whom he had met before his conversion to Catholicism and who inspired Aubrey's own conversion on a journey to Rome.  Aubrey's brother, Stephen de Vere, also converted, as well as William Smith O'Brien's daughter Charlotee Grace O'Brien and William Monsell (First Lord Emly), who was the brother-in-law of Edwin Wyndham-Quinn (Third Earl of Dunraven), another Catholic convert at nearby Adare Manor.  Stephen Spring Rice resisted conversion but was a passionate Anglo-Catholic, writing sonnets such as 'Edification (On the Baptism of Infant St Peter).  These shared and , for their class, dissident beliefs not only gave them inexhaustible subjects of conversation but set them further apart from the majority in Anglo-Ireland.

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For the O'Brien's, de Veres and Monsells each had a family tradition of liberalism.  The description of the de Vere family, recalled by Aubrey, spending their Sunday evenings at the gates of the demesne dancing with the country people, when with 'gay, though half bashful confidence .... some rosy peasant girl would advance and drop a curtsy ' before one of the party from the Big House, ' that curtsy being an invitation to dance', may have been more prevalent in pre-famine Ireland than is commonly remembered. But the fifteen year old Aubrey's scrambling to the top of the column on the hill opposite Curragh Chase to add a lighted torch to the bonfires that the country people had lit to celebrate the passing of the Act of Catholic Emancipation was defiantly less usual.  William Smith O'Brien, eleven years older than Aubrey, had voted for Catholic Emancipation as MP of Ennis. He had joined Spring Rice in support for assisted emigration, education reform and an Irish poor law at Westminister, but had differed over repeal, becoming instead one of O'Connell's staunchest supporters.