In 1987 Roscommon County Council came to Boyle, looked at the wreck of a Georgian townhouse with the roof fallen in and trees growing out of it, and decided the sensible thing was to knock it and put a car park there. The tenders went out. Three days before the work was due to start, a contingent went up from Boyle and asked them not to.

That is the story Mary Lavin tells to people who walk in off the street with an hour to spare. She has guided at King House since 2016, and this episode is her tour, with Carlo asking the questions a local would ask.

“300 years of history in one hour. Are you ready for it?”

A blow-in to Boyle

Mary is from Ballymoe in Co. Galway, 22 miles from Boyle, and calls herself a blow-in. She is one of five. Her parents ran the shop in the middle of the village: groceries, a petrol pump, her father John Connerton working as the local butcher, and an antique shop alongside it.

The antique shop is where the rest of her life comes from. People came in restoring period houses and hotels, and they did not just want the piece, they wanted to know where it had been and who had made it. She went to the auctions with her father and unpacked the lots at home, looking at the workmanship.

She married in 1987 and moved to the Frenchpark Road, where her husband’s parents had bought land with a period house on it back in the fifties. The two of them brought it back, and Ballymore House is Georgian again as a result. She has been in Boyle 37 years.

“When I arrived in Boyle, from a needle to an anchor, I didn’t have to leave the town to get it.”

She is careful about the years since. Business is not what it was and she says so, but she lists what is still trading, backs the town team and the work going into the paths and the paint, and on the disruption says you cannot make an omelette without breaking the eggs.

40 rooms, 35 fireplaces, too small

The King story starts with John King, who came from Yorkshire in 1603 and was granted the deeds of Boyle Abbey by Queen Elizabeth the First for services to the crown. The lands had been held by the Cistercians and the MacDermots, and came to 4,127 acres. Mary tells visitors what he said about the place he had arrived into, because she thinks people should hear it in his own words rather than hers.

“I am John King, your most humble servant. I came here with Elizabeth’s armies to suppress the enemy.”

His descendant Sir Henry King built King House between 1720 and 1730. The family lived in it for something short of fifty years, with 35 people working for them, and then left. The reason is the good part.

“40 rooms, 35 fireplaces, too small.”

It was a townhouse and not a big enough statement of what they had, so they went out to Rockingham and left it empty.

Recruits of fourteen, five feet in height

Three years later the War Office in London bought it for 3,000 pounds sterling and made a barracks of it. The Connaught Rangers were there from 1788 until 1922. Recruits were taken at fourteen years of age and five feet in height, trained in Boyle, sent on to Renmore, and then to war.

The Rangers changed the face of the building. They put up the curved walls, turned what is now the dining room into their gymnasium, and on a wet day drilled the young lads up and down the long gallery.

After they disbanded, the Irish army had it until the early fifties. Then it was somewhere to sell fuel out of. Then nothing. The roof went in, the windows went, the ivy and the trees took it.

Three days before the project was to begin

By 1987 the council had it down for demolition. The delegation that went up from Boyle three days beforehand got a hearing, and the county manager of the day, Donald Connolly from Waterford, and his committee changed their minds. Work started in 1989.

Mary is clear about what they were starting with.

“There really was nothing of value, only a lot of rubbish.”

Twenty six loads of it came out before anyone could think about what the building might become, and part of the roof had asbestos in it. It opened to the public in 1995.

The night Rockingham burned

The Kings went first to Kingston Hall, then in 1807 hired John Nash, who had already worked on Buckingham Palace, to build Rockingham. It was finished in 1817 and cost 52,000 pounds. Tunnels ran in under the house, the mouth of one out towards the lake, so cargo could come up without anyone having to look at it.

A woman told Mary at the arts festival one year that her grandfather had been the postman there. He went in through the tunnel and a servant girl was standing waiting with a silver tray, and the post went onto the tray.

In 1957, while the family were away at the Doncaster horse sales, Rockingham went on fire. Five fire brigades fought it. People went in at their own risk and pulled pictures off the walls, chains and all, and broke the cabinets with stones to get the china out. Some of what was saved that night was later given to King House and is on display.

The Land Commission had taken the estate in 1955, divided it into parcels and brought in families from Mayo and Meath. The house stood until September 1971, when after a good deal of argument and protest it was pulled down.

“It was shortsightedness, and lack of vision.”

She does not pretend it is simple. It was a sensitive area in terms of our history, she says, and that has to be respected. She also says the houses were built by Irish people, and that a restored Rockingham would be the crowning glory of the town now.

Born three doors from King House

Maureen O’Sullivan was born in 1911 to Charles J. O’Sullivan, an officer stationed at King House, three doors up the street. Three days later her father got an overseas posting and she was reared by her grandfather at Riversdale House. She went to boarding school at twelve, then to a finishing school at Roehampton where Vivien Leigh was her best friend, and was spotted at a charity ball in the RDS and taken to Hollywood.

She came back in 1988 with her second husband, James Cushing. There was a mass in Saint Joseph’s, a plaque unveiled on the building where she was born, and a gathering on Main Street. John Burke told Mary that when she walked back into Riversdale House she named every room off before she went into it, as if she had not been away. A tree was planted across from King House, she put a coin into the base of it, and took a few leaves back to Hollywood. It is still there and Mary points it out.

The museum devoted to her is one of several. There is the Connaught Rangers Museum, where people find a photograph belonging to somebody of their own and where Mary says there are tears as often as there is gladness. There is the Hidden Gem, the workshop of a German jeweller who never made the same piece twice, on display after his widow Doris insisted the work should be seen. And there is the Mary McAleese collection, 86 gifts presented to the former president in office.

Her own favourite of the 86 is a Last Supper from Yasser Arafat, worked in mother of pearl and set round with abalone shell for the year 2000. After that, jade from China, a black panther from Nigeria, amber from Poland. One piece, from Saudi Arabia, was recently found to have been presented to Martin McAleese rather than to his wife.

The long gallery, 116 feet of it

The long gallery is the first room you walk into and it was built to do exactly that to you. It runs 116 feet, or 35 metres. Carriages pulled up at the foot of the steps, guests came in through the front door with two fires lit, and a hot port was going round on a silver tray before they had their coats off.

One of the original fireplaces left the house when the Kings fell on hard times and was bought by Desmond Guinness. The restoration tracked it down and got it back in two pieces, and Feeley Stone put it together again. You would not know to look at it. The floor is the 1730 floor and the front door is the original, painted a good many times.

No light on your bicycle

In the unsettled years after the Rangers disbanded in July 1922, ordinary people were held in the cells at King House. Mary lists what for: no light on your bicycle, an unpaid debt, being drunk. In there, as she puts it, to put manners on you.

The cells looked out over the Boyle River, and there were two escapes. One morning the inmates were called out to the corridor to wash. Men outside had got word in and cut the bars on a window facing the water. Jim Molloy went out through it, dropped into the river, crossed into the pleasure grounds and was hidden. The officers scoured the county and never found him, because he was inside a reek of turf.

In 2016 Barry Feeley showed a series of charcoal works about that period at King House. Matt Molloy came to open the exhibition and told the room he would not have been standing there at all only for his father getting out of that window in 1922.

The corporal on duty is understood to have left the way clear. Carlo asks what was in it for a British soldier. Mary says she believes he was courting a girl in a shop down the street, and that information went back and forth.

The hub of the town

King House now takes weddings, gatherings after funerals, book launches, the craft fair, piano exams and the Boyle Arts Festival, which runs ten days and can put a thousand people through in a day. Since the Royal went, the town has needed a room, and this is the room.

It does not stand on its own either. The tea rooms in the courtyard are run by Dorothy, the craft shop everyone still calls Úna Bhán trades under new branding, the library is downstairs, resident artists use the Harrington rooms, and the farmers market has been going on a Saturday morning for eighteen years.

Her own favourite room is the dining room. Three south facing windows over the pleasure grounds, and the warmth of it when she walks in.

“Some days I never even looked at my watch for my lunch break, because there’s so much grandeur attached to it.”

300 years of history in one hour

People ask how long the tour takes and she gives them the line about 300 years in one hour. Three hours later some of them are still in the building, telling her at the desk they had no idea this was here.

Asked what she will do next, she says she will keep guiding for as long as she is able.

“I will do my best to keep King House flying the flag forever.”

The last thing she wants on the record is the car park. Not that it happened, but that it did not. Boyle Abbey, then King House, then Lough Key, in that order, and as she tells visitors, you cannot have one without the other.