Mount Trenchard house stands in it's thickly wooded demesne overlooking

the River Shannon, flanked on one side by the dormitories, classrooms and

chapel built during the period when the Sisters of Mercy owned the demesne, with its blocked tunnel, its altered windows and doors is as eloquent of its varied history as stone and mortar can be.  What is less plain is that the story which unfolded at this particular place in the Irish landscape was both typical of stories enacted elsewhere and for a period of 100 years, unusual , even exemplary.  For the family which owned the estate in the nineteenth and early twentieth century brought a passion and intelligence to their role as landlords which heightened the essential ambiguity of the Anglo-Irish position in Ireland and inevitably had a profound effect on the lives of those who lived within the orbit of the estate.  Many of these people lived on a loosely assembled estate which the single house is its cultivated demesne does not immediately recall.  Equally, the close connections between Mount Trenchard and the local economy and between this estate and other comparable estates is this corner of West Limerick are not apparent until the lives of the successive inhabitants of the house are considered.