[4][5] Ardilaun enjoyed painting, collecting her watercolours in a bound album, and was a member of the Water Colour Society of Ireland.

The couple completely rebuilt the Dublin house, renaming it from Thornhill to St Anne's, as well as arranging a grand addition to Ashford Castle.

Increasingly cut off and isolated by her status and history, she allowed the house to fall into disrepair and in her final years she moved into the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, where she died aged 75.

[1][5][13][14][15] She had inherited her birthplace Macroom Castle, and completely restored it and parts of the town, as it had once belonged to her direct ancestor Donough MacCarty, 1st Earl of Clancarty, a leader of Confederate Ireland in the 1640s.

[18] St Anne's house eventually burned down in 1943, having fallen even further into disrepair, and the grounds are now Dublin's second biggest municipal park.

[19] Lady Ardilaun's architect cousin Katherine Everett recalled visiting the ruins of Macroom Castle in August 1922, soon after the fire, and recorded Olivia's deep sense of loss: "When people have been born and have grown up in a house on their own land, where their forebears have lived and died for generations, they may feel not only love for it, but a bond which ties them to every stone and tree and sod of the place".