Two Claims to Fame, One Estate
Belvedere's follies are usually overshadowed by the spite-built Jealous Wall. But the smaller Gothic buildings on the estate have a remarkable backstory of their own: they came from Thomas Wright (1711–1786), an English astronomer who, a decade before he turned his hand to Belvedere, had published the first credible explanation of what the Milky Way actually is. Few visitors realise that the same mind responsible for a foundational idea in modern cosmology also shaped a corner of a Westmeath garden.
The Man Who Mapped the Milky Way
In 1750, Wright published An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe. In it he proposed that the band of light we call the Milky Way is an optical effect — the view we get because the Sun and Earth sit inside a vast, roughly flat layer of stars, so we see far more of them looking along the plane than looking out of it. He went further, speculating that the faint "nebulae" astronomers could see might be entirely separate star systems — distant galaxies in their own right.
Both ideas were, broadly, correct, and both were well ahead of their time. Wright's book directly influenced the philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) developed the "island universe" idea that became central to how we understand the cosmos. Not bad for a self-taught instrument maker from a Durham mining village.
The Astronomer as Architect
Wright was not only a stargazer. He was a mathematician, an instrument maker, a teacher, a garden designer and — crucially for Belvedere — an architect, and one of the earliest figures of the Gothic Revival. He worked extensively in Ireland after travelling there in 1746–47, a trip that also produced Louthiana (1748), an illustrated record of the ancient monuments of County Louth.
His Irish Gothic Buildings
Gothic garden buildings based on Wright's drawings appear at Tollymore Park in County Down, around Dundalk in County Louth, and at Belvedere House in County Westmeath. He was designing fanciful, romantic garden architecture decades before the Gothic Revival became fashionable — an architectural counterpart to the originality of his astronomy.
What Wright Designed at Belvedere
At Belvedere, Wright's hand is in the estate's Gothic Arch and the Octagonal Gazebo — the elegant, deliberately picturesque garden structures that punctuate the parkland. Unlike the Jealous Wall, which was built to destroy a view, Wright's buildings were designed to frame one: to give the eye somewhere to rest, to mark a turn in a walk, to make the landscape feel composed. They reward a slower visit — most people walk straight past them on the way to the big wall.
There's a pleasing symmetry to it. A man who spent his life thinking about how we see the stars also thought carefully about how we see a garden. Both come down to the same question: where you stand, and what the world looks like from there.
Belvedere's Other Designer: Richard Castle
Wright designed the follies; the house itself was the work of a different talent. The Georgian villa at Belvedere was designed around 1740 by Richard Castle, the leading Palladian architect of 18th-century Ireland. Between them, two of the most accomplished designers of the age left their mark on a single Westmeath estate. Read about him in our Richard Castle heritage trail.
See the follies for yourself
The Gothic Arch, the Octagonal Gazebo and the Jealous Wall are all on the estate trail. Plan a visit and walk the parkland Thomas Wright helped compose.
Plan Your Visit →Plan Your Visit to Belvedere
Belvedere House is on the R392, about 5 km south of Mullingar, roughly 90 minutes from Dublin via the N4/M4. Free parking on-site. See the visitor information page for hours and admission, the follies guide for the estate's garden buildings, and the history of the house for the full Rochfort story.