Strokestown Park & National Famine Museum

Strokestown Park is a Palladian mansion completed in the 1730s, the seat of the Mahon family on the edge of Strokestown village in County Roscommon. The house passed through several owners until 1979, when Jim Callery's Westward Group bought the estate and preserved the Mahon family papers found inside; the Irish Heritage Trust manages it today. It is one of the most significant famine heritage sites in Ireland, primarily because of what was found in the house: a near-complete archive of estate papers from the 1840s.

The National Famine Museum, housed in the stable yards, uses the Mahon family correspondence and estate records to document the experience of the Great Famine at a single estate level. The documents include rent records, letters from starving tenants, and the landlord's decision to pay for the emigration of 1,490 tenants to Canada in 1847. Major Denis Mahon was shot dead on his own lands in November 1847, apparently in reprisal for the conditions of the emigration ships. The museum is one of the most detailed and affecting presentations of the famine in any Irish visitor experience.

The house itself is notable for its kitchen — a galleried room where the cook could receive instructions from the landlady on the floor above through a hole in the floor — and the 4-acre walled garden has been restored to its Georgian-era layout.