So that as regards its appearance Castle Richmond might have been in Hampshire or Essex; and as regards his property, Sir Thomas Fitzgerald might have been a Leicestershire baronet.
Here, at Castle Richmond, lived Sir Thomas with his wife and daughters; and here, taking the period of our story as being exactly thirteen years since, his son Herbert was staying also in those hard winter months; his Oxford degree having been taken, and his English pursuits admitting of a temporary sojourn in Ireland.
But Sir Thomas Fitzgerald was not the great man of that part of the country--at least, not the greatest man; nor was Lady Fitzgerald by any means the greatest lady.

As this greatest lady, and the greatest man also, will, with their belongings, be among the most prominent of our dramatis personae, it may be well that I should not even say a word of them.
All the world must have heard of Desmond Court.

It is the largest inhabited residence known in that part of the world, where rumours are afloat of how it covers ten acres of ground; how in hewing the stones for it a whole mountain was cut away; how it should have cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, only that the money was never paid by the rapacious, wicked, bloodthirsty old earl who caused it to be erected;--and how the cement was thickened with human blood.

So goes rumour with the more romantic of the Celtic tale-bearers.
It is a huge place--huge, ungainly, and uselessly extensive; built at a time when, at any rate in Ireland, men considered neither beauty, aptitude, nor economy.

It is three stories high, and stands round a quadrangle, in which there are two entrances opposite to each other.
Nothing can be well uglier than that great paved court, in which there is not a spot of anything green, except where the damp has produced an unwholesome growth upon the stones; nothing can well be more desolate.