BROWNE [The Marquess of SLIGO] Westport House and The Brownes.

With illustrations and pedigrees. Derbyshire: Moorland Publishers, 1981. pp. 111. Green paper boards, titled in gilt. Signed by the author on front endpaper. A fine copy in pictorial dust jacket.
The Brownes, an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family, are direct descendants of Grace O’Malley or Gráinne Ní Mháille (1530-c.1603), the famous Irish pirate and “Queen of Connaught”. She was chief of the O’Malley clan and ruled the seas around the west coast of Ireland. It was on the foundations of one of her castles, that Westport House, in the shadows of Croagh Patrick was built, and the family seat of the Brownes was held for almost three hundred years.

The Browne family came to County Mayo from Sussex, England, in the sixteenth century. Through marriage with the daughters of native Irish landowners and by purchase, the Browne family built a small estate near The Neale, a small village in the province of Connacht, south of County Mayo.

As a Catholic family they were fortunate that their lands were situated in Connacht and managed to escape the notorious Cromwellian confiscations of much of Ireland.

Sir John Browne (1604-1670), first Baronet of The Neale, whose eldest son, the second Baronet, was the ancestor of the Barons Kilmaine whose younger son was Colonel John Browne (1636-1711) in the service of the Irish Army, of King James II. Colonel John Browne’s grandson, John Browne (1709-1776) represented Castlebar in the Irish House of Commons. He was created Baron Mount Eagle in 1760, Viscount Westport in 1768 and Earl of Altamont in 1771. Interestingly, the titles of Mount Eagle and Altamont were derived from Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s holy mountain, where Saint Patrick in the year 441, spent 40 days fasting on the mountain.
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