White Knights, Dark Earls is to date the most extensive published account of Mitchelstown Castle, which was the biggest neo-Gothic house in Ireland.

[citation needed] Further difficulties arose as a result of internal family squabbling, legal disputes and the Land War of the 1880s, in which the estate played a prominent part.

Then owner, William Downes Webber (second husband of Anna, Dowager Countess of Kingston), his relatives and servants were 'evicted' to houses in nearby King Square.

However, in early August, the contents of the building were stolen by some republicans, including paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and William Beechey, as well as silver, furniture, wall hangings, and mantlepieces.

[4] In the 1940s, Mitchelstown Co-operative Agricultural Society built a milk processing factory on the site of the castle, which it had purchased together with some of the demesne lands that surrounded it.

The proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft[5] was governess there to the children of the household, including Margaret King, later Countess Mount Cashell, to whom Percy Bysshe Shelley dedicated his poem, A Sensitive Plant.