Borris House, situated in South County Carlow on the River Barrow, with views of the Blackstairs Mountains, is one of Ireland's most important country houses. Seat of the McMorrough Kavanagh family, whose ancestors have lived on the site since the fifteenth century, it is one of the very few houses in Ireland that is still occupied by the family for whom it was built and it still contains a great deal of its original furniture, paintings, documentary archives and other artefacts. Originally an important castle guarding the River Barrow, Borris House was rebuilt in 1731 and later altered by the architectural dynastic family, The Morrisons, in the early 1800s. The Morrisons, chiefly Richard and William, are also responsible for the alterations and additions to Kilruddery in Co Wicklow, Carton House in Co Kildare, Fota House in Co Cork and Shelton Abbey, Co Wicklow to name but a few. Externally, they clothed the 18th c house in a thin Tudor Gothic disguise, adding a crenellated arcaded porch on the entrance and decorating the windows with rectangular and ogival hood-moulds. Inside the house the Morrisons created an exuberant series of rooms beginning with the most florid room of the house, the entrance hall, where a circle is created within a square space with the clever use of pairs of scagliola columns and richly modelled plasterwork. The ceiling is like a great wheel with its shallowly coved circular centre from which eight beams radiate outwards. The plasterwork is profuse with festoons in the frieze, eagles with outspread wings in the spandrels and swirling acanthus in the cove of the ceiling. The drawing room is double apsed with a trellis pattern similar to the one used in the library at Cangort Park while the dining room boasts a screen of Roman Ionic scagliola columns and pilasters and a frieze of swagged bucrania such as was used again in the dining rooms at Fota. The chapel, which is in the same Tudor Gothic mode as the stair hall in the main house, has a plaster rib-vaulted ceiling, a gallery at one end and an alter apse at the other, flanked by two canopied balconies containing the preaching desk and the organ pipes.