The story of Caledon
Caledon was historically Kinnaird, under the lordship of a branch of the O'Neills of Tyrone, who held a castle here in the late 1400s. The settlement was burned in 1608 during the upheavals of the Plantation. The estate passed to the Boyle Earls of Cork and Orrery, and it was the 5th Earl, John Boyle, a friend of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, who built the Bone House folly around 1747, faced with ox bones, as a summer house in the demesne.
In 1776 James Alexander bought the estate from the 7th Earl of Cork and Orrery for £96,400. He commissioned the architect Thomas Cooley to build a classical mansion, Caledon House, in 1779. Alexander rose through the Irish peerage, made Baron Caledon in 1790, Viscount in 1797 and Earl of Caledon in 1800.
Under the 2nd Earl, Du Pre Alexander, the estate and village were transformed. Around 1808 to 1812 the architect John Nash added domed wings to the house and designed the grand Twin Lodges at the main entrance, set with Coade-stone sphinxes, the Caledon arms and gilded coronets. In the 1820s the village itself was rebuilt with terraces of stone cottages, a market house and a courthouse, giving Caledon the Georgian streetscape that survives today.
St John's church, with its needle spire, stands over the village, the parish reaching back to the older church of Aghaloo destroyed in the rising of 1641. The demesne, enhanced by landscape designers John Sutherland and W.S. Gilpin in the early 1800s, remains the private seat of the Earls of Caledon, while the conservation village around it is open to anyone who wants to walk it.