Markree Castle in Sligo now sold – but it will open in March 2016 after a €5m restoration project
The exterior and the Open fire at the foot of the staircase of Markree Castle, in Co Sligo.
One of the country’s finest Victorian Gothic Revival castles has been sold to a hotel group which specialises in the restoration of such venues.
Sligo’s Markree Castle, which is a member of the luxury Manor House Hotels group, has been sold to the Corscadden family.
The property sold for an undisclosed sum, but it had been on the market at the start of May for €3.12 million.
The Corscadden family business also own Cabra Castle in Kingscourt, Co Cavan, Bellingham Castle in Castlebellingham, Co Louth, and Ballyseede Castle in Tralee, Co Kerry. All castles are operating as hotels.
Manor House Hotels is member-owned non-profit organisation, established in 1986 to market small independent luxury and family run Irish properties overseas. The four Corscadden family owned castles are all members of Manor House Hotels.
Markree Castle will be closed until March 2016 as it undergoes a €5 million restoration project which will be carried out in three phases over three years.
The grand staircase at Markree Castle
The first phase of this will concentrate on the public areas and a large portion of the hotel’s 30 bedrooms.
Charles Cooper, who was the previous owner of Markree, will work alongside the Corscaddens to safeguard the authenticity of what is one of Ireland’s most historic castles.
This is the first time that Markree Castle has changed hands since it was gifted to the Cooper family by Cromwell in the mid-17th century. It has been a 30-bedroom hotel and popular location for wedding celebrations for the last 25 years and is situated in 225 acres of parkland, home to the castle’s resident flock of rare-breed Wensleydale sheep.
“We are delighted to add this incredible property to the Corscadden collection of Irish castles,” said Howard Corscadden.
“As a family, we have known the Coopers for many years, not just as colleagues in the hotel industry, but also as fellow members of the Manor House Hotels portfolio.
“We feel honoured that they have entrusted us to take care of their ancestral home and its 350 years of history. It is our intention to build on the already strong reputation that Markree Castle enjoys locally, nationally and internationally.”
This is the fourth castle in the Corscadden collection.
Three generations of the family have worked in the hospitality industry, beginning with Alec Corscadden and his wife Mamie who ran the Arcadia Ballroom in Bray, Co. Wicklow during the 1940s and 1950s.
It was the premier ballroom of the Irish showband era, large enough to accommodate 5,000 on the dancefloor. In the early 1960s, their son Pappy and his wife Mitzie converted the old regional hospital in Kildare Town into the Derby House Hotel, which ran until the 1990s.
In 1991, Pappy and Mitzie purchased the family’s first castle -Cabra Castle – before passing on the baton to their children who are the current custodians of the collection.
A new test offers hope for heart attack victims
A simple test developed in the West of Scotland could predict if a patient will survive a heart attack.
The test can accurately work out the extent of vessel injury in the heart, and can predict if the patient is likely to go on to develop heart failure, or even die.
It was developed at the Golden Jubilee Hospital in Clydebank, which is Scotland’s national heart and lung centre.
The test – known as the Index of Microvascular Resistance (IMR) – uses a pressure and temperature sensitive wire inserted into the coronary artery.
Early treatment following a heart attack can reduce the chance of heart failure and improve both wellbeing and chances of survival.
For those who survive a heart attack there is a risk that the heart will have been damaged, which can lead to heart failure.
The study was carried out in partnership with the University of Glasgow and the British Heart Foundation and will will be presented at the British Cardiovascular Society annual conference today.
Lead researcher Professor Colin Berry, a Cardiologist at the Golden Jubilee National Hospital, said: “After a suspected heart attack, a patient is routinely given a coronary angiogram to identify any narrowed blood vessels.
“Currently, we make treatment decisions based on this standard assessment technique but it can only identify narrowed vessels and cannot tell the doctor if, or how much, heart blood vessel damage has occurred.
“This new technique can tell us the level of damage in a matter of minutes, allowing us to quickly and accurately identify patients who are at a high risk of heart failure after their heart attack.
“The results of this study will help us improve the outlook for this group of patients and help us develop new treatments to limit heart damage, reducing the burden of heart failure on the patient, their families and carers.”
Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “More and more people are surviving heart attacks due to the huge advances we’ve made in cardiology, but that isn’t the end of the story.
“If we can identify the people at greatest risk of developing heart failure following a heart attack, and treat them more quickly, we could reduce the effects that these terrible events can have on individuals and communities.”
Here are the top 15 items Irish people flush down the loo (that they shouldn’t)
Are you guilty?
Irish people are flushing all sorts of items down their toilets and it’s not doing our drains or the environment any favours.
A survey by An Taisce’s Clean Coasts Ireland and Irish Water of over 1,000 people over the age 18 reveals that three in 10 Irish adults have flushed items other than toilet paper down the toilet.
So what are we throwing down there without a thought for where it will end up?
Here’s the list:
Baby wipes 58%
Facial wipes 40%
Cotton buds 26%
Tampons 24%
Cigarette butts 21%
Plasters 18%
Condoms 18%
Food 15%
Medicines 12%
Sanitary pads 6%
Tampon applicators 5%
Toilet roll tube 4%
Nappies 2%
Cotton wool 1%
Dental floss 1%
Baby wipes are the worst offenders, with 6 in 10 adults admitting to flushing them. They are also one of the lead causes for fatbergs.
Fatbergs are caused by build up of sanitary products that can form into massive lumps of sludge.
Just recently a ten-tonne fatberg was pulled from a London sewer, so the authorities are anxious to avoid that over here.
This is the reaction you’re looking for:
One in every two females said they flushed female hygiene products, while males on the other hand dispose of more cotton buds, cigarettes, plasters and condoms.
Sure what’s the harm?
The survey also found the main reason for people doing this is due to lack of knowledge, with 40% saying they thought it was okay to do so and 33% saying they did it out of convenience.
In order to change peoples’ way of thinking, the ‘Think Before You Flush’ campaign is being launched to prevent items washing up on Ireland’s beaches.
Annabel FitzGerald, Coastal Programmes manager at An Taisce said:
“During Clean Coasts Big Beach Clean in September 2014, a total of 1,191 cotton bud sticks were found on 103 beaches. By making small changes in our flushing behaviour we can prevent the harm caused by sewage related litter in the marine environment.”
Elizabeth Arnett, head of communications in Irish Water said the initiative is necessary:
“One of our major remits is the provision of reliable wastewater treatment, but everyone has a part to play in ensuring our beaches and rivers are pollution free. Through this campaign we can work together to improve our local freshwaters and coastal areas.’’
Photographer captures breathtaking underwater shots of waves breaking
An underwater photographer has captured some incredible photos of what waves look like when they break – revealing a mysterious world beneath the surf.
Mark Tipple, a documentary photographer from South Australia, created a series of photos called Mare Vida with a slow shutter lens on the Cook Islands.
The 33-year-old, who was planning to take photographs underwater with his friend Mike, said: “On the first day the tide dropped out faster than we had anticipated, and Mike came off second best.
“A wave picked him up and bounced him over the reef for a good 20 metres, over sharp coral heads and urchins, leaving every limb to bleed as soon as he left the water.
“With the shoot put on hold until Mike’s wounds healed over I looked for something else to shoot underwater, when fish didn’t hold my interest I changed the settings on the camera, and found something I haven’t seen before.”
Mark originally created a series of underwater photos including people under the sea in the three years before he took the Mare Vida series. He made them into a book called The Underwater Project.
Sugar does not make children hyperactive, claims a psychologist
Professor David Benton says it’s a myth that sugary food and drinks make children hyperactive but parents expect children to misbehave?
Children are made hyperactive by their parents expectations, a psychologist has warned
For any parent who has witnessed the manic mayhem of a children’s birthday party, it might come as something of a shock, but sugar does not make children more hyperactive, according to experts.
Psychologists believe what parents mistake for a ‘sugar rush’ is just the natural high-spirits of children when they get together, and it is merely a coincidence that those events often include cakes or sweets.
In fact, parents could be making the problem worse by expecting their children to misbehave after sugary foods and so reinforcing the stereotype, and making youngsters act up.
Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival David Benton, professor of psychology at Swansea University said: “People are mixing the fact that it gives you energy with feeling energetic.
“Sugar does not increase the activity of children. It is the expectation of the parents. Children get hyperactive at party, running around wild and winding themselves up. That is the problem distinguishing one thing from another. The child knows they can let themselves go so they do.
“But there is a very clear message that sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children.”
“Because the mother anticipated a problem they put their child on a much shorter rein and interpreted behaviour differently and see what they wanted to see.
“I’ve done work where we gave glucose to many hundreds of people and I am absolutely confident it doesn’t make people feel energetic. It just doesn’t I’m afraid.”
Sugar does not make children hyperactive
- Did banning sugar turn my kids into sweet little angels?
- Children labelled hyperactive really ‘just naughty’
Prof Benton said studies have shown that giving sugary drinks to children at school actually makes them concentrate more fully perform better in tests and improves mood.
“They spend more time on their schoolwork,” he said,
“That’s not to say we should be giving sugar drinks to children. But children are different from adults in that their brain is a larger percentage of their body so it takes a larger percentage of energy. Also the brain tissue uses twice as much energy so you need a continual supply of energy.
“That’s not to say it should be supplied by sugar drinks but a child does need on a regular basis to be consuming food. When it is released slowly the child is in a better mood and preforms better at school.”
Children will always be more boisterous when they get together regardless of the sugar content of food
Children with ADHD ‘should be allowed to fidget’
Prof Benton also said it was a myth that sugar is as addictive as cocaine.
“Anything to do with pleasure involves the release of dopamine in reward pathways in the brain,” he said.
“But scientists have found no strong evidence for people, being addicted to chemical substances in certain foods.”
However Graham Macgregor , Professor Graham MacGregor, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Wolfson Institute, Queen Mary University of London, told the festival that the food industry needed to dramatically reduce the amount of sugar in processed foods to prevent the obesity epidemic growing,
“The food industry is overfeeding us with vast amounts of sugar,” he said.
“Why should we ban tobacco while allowing advertising of food that is going to kill people. It’s a scandal. We need a tax on soft drinks.
“What we eat is now the biggest cause of death and disability in the world and food industry to blame. Processed food if full of fat and salt and sugar with no feeling of satiation.”
Ancient Irish people preferred British ‘Magical’ gold to their own
The people of ancient Ireland snubbed their local gold in favor of more exotic, mystical gold found from across the sea, new research shows.
Scientists had long assumed that the gold that people in Ireland used during the early Bronze Age, about 4,000 years ago, came from nearby mineral-rich mountains. But now, extremely sensitive chemical analyses have revealed that the gold had been extracted from an area farther away, across the Irish Sea, in what’s now southwestern Britain.
This is the oldest gold known to archaeology, said Christopher Standish, lead author of the new study and a research fellow at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. Dating the gold artifacts, such as embossed gold armlets and gold oval plaques, can be tricky because the artifacts are often found isolated from one another, he said.
Standish and his colleagues analyzed the lead isotopes in the gold artifacts, and compared the values to lead isotopes measured in potential sources of the gold, to determine their origin. Although the artifacts were originally collected and analyzed in the 1960s, Standish’s study is the first to conduct sensitive isotope analyses on the artifacts.
Lead isotopes are produced by the radioactive decay of the uranium that is found mixed in with the gold in the artifacts. Over time, a uranium atom will break down into a lead atom, and scientists can measure the relative amounts of uranium and lead in a sample to figure out how much time has elapsed.
When Standish began his research, he thought he would find about the same number of lead isotopes in the Mourne Mountains in northwestern Ireland and the gold relics found in Ireland, he said. When the numbers didn’t match, he looked to gold sources in southwestern Britain. Indeed, they matched closely, showing that the gold circulated in prehistoric Ireland did not come from Ireland.
Although there are many possible sources of gold in Ireland, evidence of Irish gold has not been found.
“It is unlikely that knowledge of how to extract gold didn’t exist in Ireland, as we see large-scale exploitation of other metals,” Standishsaid in a statement. “It is more probable that an ‘exotic’ origin was cherished as a key property of gold and was an important reason behind why it was imported for production.”
The mysterious, foreign gold — which was often molded into circular, sunlike shapes — complements belief systems revolving sun worship, as it would have been ideal material for sacred objects, Standish told Live Science. Knowing the source of the gold could help archaeologists learn more about the religious and functional reasons for these artifacts.
Similar gold artifacts from the early Bronze Age have not yet been discovered in Britain, indicating that people there likely viewed gold as more of a commodity. The gold was likely exported from Britain and then worked up into artifacts in Ireland, Standish said. The next steps in his research will be to measure the lead isotopes of other possible sources in southwestern Britain and Wales to form a comprehensive regional picture of the different gold deposits.
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