Accidentally finding the ‘Spirit of Place’ on our placemaking exploration of County Kilkenny
🇪🇺 COUNTY KILKENNY: Week 6 of Place Engage’s 26-week, 26-county non-political placemaking tour for the duration of Ireland’s EU Council Presidency
A road closure, a wrong turn, and a monument to the Kilkenny craftsman who designed the White House — hiding in plain sight on a triangle of grass near Cuffesgrange.
There is a particular reward in being sent the wrong way. En route from Paulstown to Callan, an RTA road closure diverted me down a country road I had never driven — through the townland of Burnchurch, worth a day’s exploration in its own right — and then past what I took for a stone bus shelter, until the glass panels caught my eye and made me reverse and pull in.
I had never even heard of the James Hoban memorial at Desart, Cuffesgrange. It is an open-air arbour marking the birthplace of the Kilkenny craftsman who went on to design the White House, and it is one of the more unexpected pieces of placemaking I have come across all year. Its name could hardly be more fitting for this project: it was made by a programme called Spirit of Place.
What is actually there
The structure reads as a sequence rather than a single object. Rough stone walls step up towards more refined elements; sections of white Carrara marble stand in for the stone of the White House; and frosted glass screens carry poignant words of place and belonging in both Irish and English, throwing a shadow across the grass as the sunlight filters through. Set on an overgrown triangle of grass a short distance off the Kilkenny–Cashel road — the N76, near the R691 for Callan — it is the kind of thing you only find if the road makes you.
The memorial was unveiled on 7 August 2008, timed to mark 250 years since Hoban’s birth. It was designed by the American architect Travis Price and raised in little over a week by students from the Spirit of Place / Spirit of Designmasters programme at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., working alongside local Irish volunteers, with Kilkenny County Council preparing the site and foundations. Local accounts record the work as an action of the Kilkenny Heritage Plan, supported by the County Council and the Heritage Council. A separate Hoban heritage marker was later installed on Green Street in Callan in 2017, so the county now remembers him in two places a few kilometres apart.
The Kilkenny man who built the President’s house
James Hoban was born on the Desart estate at Cuffesgrange, the son of a tenant farmer, and was raised there before completing his training at the Dublin Society’s Drawing School under Thomas Ivory, where he won the Duke of Leinster’s medal in 1780. He emigrated to America in the mid-1780s, made his reputation in Charleston, South Carolina, and in July 1792 won the competition — judged with George Washington’s involvement — to design the President’s House. The building he raised, rebuilt after the burning of 1814 and worked on almost until his death in Washington in December 1831, took its cues from the Georgian architecture he had grown up around; among its acknowledged references is Leinster House in Dublin, today the seat of the Oireachtas. His exact birth year is not settled — it is usually given as 1758, consistent with a 250th-anniversary unveiling in 2008, though several biographical sources place it a few years earlier, around 1755.
That is the line of sight the arbour quietly holds; from a tenant farm on a Kilkenny estate to Pennsylvania Avenue, marked at the exact rural spot where it began rather than relocated to a town centre or a visitor car park.
Why it belongs in a placemaking week
I keep returning to how this small structure works as placemaking, because it does several things a county could learn from. It marks a genuinely global story at its origin point. It was built with a place and its volunteers rather than delivered to it. And it trusts the landscape to hold it — no signage-heavy interpretation centre, no barrier, just an object on a triangle of grass that rewards the person who slows down.
It also raises the harder question the rest of the Kilkenny week keeps asking. A piece of cultural heritage this good sits unsignposted on a back road, its grass triangle overgrown — which goes straight to the matter of community buy-in and community ownership. The making was excellent. The keeping — wayfinding, maintenance, the small budget that keeps a rural monument legible — is the part of placemaking that can fall off a cliff once the original funding dries up, if there is not genuine community ownership behind it. I have consistently found harnessing, building and maintaining community capacity to be the weakest part of Ireland’s placemaking puzzle, despite a wealth of local knowledge and willingness.
While the official motto of Ireland’s EU Council Presidency is Ní neart go cur le chéile — no strength without togetherness — for our 26-county, 26-week non-political placemaking tour we adopted Faigheann cos ar siúl rud nach bhfaigheann cos ina cónaí: a walking foot finds something the resting foot never would. Six weeks in, that has certainly held true. And if placemaking is about the spirit of a place, this one is a reminder that the spirit still needs the community to care enough to cut the grass and keep the path in.
Thinking of visiting? The James Hoban memorial sits on the R691 off the N76 Kilkenny–Cashel road, near Cuffesgrange and Callan, County Kilkenny. It is roadside and freely accessible; there is no dedicated car park, however, there is a very quiet laneway running alongside where you can turn into, just pay particular attention when pulling in and out onto the narrown road as visibility is not great. Also, there is a pathway of stone slabs that are difficult to see in its overgrown state.
Place Engage is a non-political placemaking series running across all 26 counties throughout the 26 weeks of Ireland’s EU Council Presidency, brought to you through iProperty Radio. Corrections and contributions are always welcome and encouraged! carol@placeengage.com