Sir William Wilde and Moytura
The summer house above Lough Corrib where Oscar Wilde spent boyhood holidays was built by his father, and the best book about the lake was written there. Sir William Wilde, born near Castlerea in March 1815, the youngest of five children of a country doctor, became the leading eye and ear surgeon in Dublin, oculist in ordinary to Queen Victoria, and an antiquarian and folklorist whose Lough Corrib, its Shores and Islands of 1867 still guides visitors to Inchagoill and Cong.
Checked against the source on 2026-09-19.
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Cong Abbey, Ashford castle on the 3D model; tap a pin for its page and directions.
Surgeon and scholar
Wilde ran his own St Mark's Ophthalmic Hospital for diseases of the eye and ear in Dublin and once operated on the father of George Bernard Shaw. On 12 November 1851 he married Jane Elgee, the nationalist poet Speranza; Willie and Oscar were born, and a daughter, Isola, who died in childhood, and he had three other children besides. His reputation was damaged when Mary Travers, a patient, claimed he had assaulted her under chloroform and parodied the Wildes as Dr and Mrs Quilp; the libel case that followed cost him dearly. He died on 19 April 1876.
Moytura
Wilde built Moytura House on the Galway shore of the lake near Cong, on ground named for the legendary battle, and worked there on the lake book that recorded Ashford, Inchagoill and the islands. The 2009 film Nothing Personal was shot partly at Moytura. The model on this page pins Cong Abbey and Ashford; the Lough Corrib guide has the lake he wrote about.
Questions people ask
Who was William Wilde?
Where is Moytura House?
Written from Wikipedia, "William Wilde" (CC BY-SA 4.0), read on 2026-09-19, and from the OpenStreetMap places on the model. Nothing has been added from memory; follow the source for its footnotes.