Online Tour
Nothing beats visiting a historic garden in person, seeing the plants, shrubs, buildings, and artefacts for yourself, chatting to one of our knowledgeable tour guides, and enjoying a cup of coffee afterwards in the café. To give you a taster for what you can expect to experience during your visit, please enjoy the virtual tours provided below.
Tour of the Gardens
Garinish is an island garden of immense beauty. Designed in the Arts and Crafts style by Harold Peto, it includes formal Italianate gardens set within a naturalistic Robinsonian context. The design makes great use of vistas and views of the dramatic mountain scenery and the sea.
“In Summer, when the sun shines overhead,
The water ripples gently round the Isle,
Whose cliffs drop sheer to meet the ocean bed,
Whose crevices with sunny wild flow’rs smile.”
– Nigel Erskine Bryce, 1909
Tour of Bryce House
Peto had prepared plans for an extravagant mansion on Ilnacullin but it was never constructed and the modest gardner’s cottage, built in 1912, became the Irish retreat of the well-travelled and well-connected Bryce family.
While the house has been upgraded to provide public access, it has been carefully conserved to respect its historic integrity and to reflect the lives and times of its former inhabitants. Furniture, artworks and artefacts have been put back in place using information gleaned from archival materials, photographs and a 1954 inventory.