The Recollections of Skeffington Gibbon, From 1796 to the Present Year 1829 - Being an Epitome #271139

The head of the family is now recognised by the title of that illustrious Baronet of Staines, (Sir John Gibbon,) in the County of Middlesex.<br><br>The celebrated Edward Gibbon, so esteemed for his Roman History and his Letters to Lord Chesterfield, &c. was descended from the same ancestors. He tells us his father was a merchant in the City of London - that he was born at Putney on the banks of the noble Thames - that his mother was a Miss Porten, of the enchanting Richmond Hill in the County of Surrey, and after her lamented demise, which was premature after his birth, he was brought into life by his maiden aunt, who spoonfed him for nearly nine months. However, I pass by that honorable and revered gentleman for the present, to give an account of the first of my ancestors, who accompanied Fitz-Stevens into Ireland in 1172, and obtained large manors in the Counties of Wexford and Waterford, and afterwards, on the reinforcement of Strongbow, aided by MacMurrough, King of Leinster, took possession of several strong castles in the Counties of Cork, Limerick and Tipperary. Catherine Gibbon, the celebrated Countess of Desmond, who fell by the side of her hoary-headed lord, in the eightieth year of his age, in a sanguinary battle between the Cromwellian Condons of Castlegibbon, now called Castletown-roche, on the banks of the copious and navigable River Blackwater, in the territory of the great MacCarthy, was (laughter of the ancient but unfortunate family from which I am descended.<br><br>The noble ruin called the "House of Desmond," in the town of Mallow, now in the possession of Mr. Jephson, the representative in Parliament for that borough, deserves the tourist's notice, being one of the most magnificent structures that antiquity can boast of.