landlord to 670 tenants, 316 of whom rented at less than £5 per annum. With his father’s death in 1868, Arthur Guinness, 2nd Baronet and oldest son and heir, continued in his father’s footsteps, purchasing vast swaths of Galway. "He bought the Elwood estate of Strandhill, just across the river from Ashford, Cong, in 1871, and Lord Kilmaine sold him the Inishdoorus islands on Lough Corrib, and lands in the barony of Ross, part of Nymphsfield near Cong in 1875. William Burke of Lisloughry was his agent". When Arthur's acquisitions were combined with those of his father, total acreage for the Ashford estate was 33,298 with the result that Lord Ardilaun owned most of County Galway between Maam (Maum) Bridge and Lough Mask. Owning 33,000 acres recently bought by his father or himself in Counties Galway and Mayo, Ardilaun was placed in a difficult and unusual position during the Land War of the 1880s. Tenant farmers had started a rent strike against absentee landlords who cared little about their estates. In contrast, Ardilaun lived at Ashford for much of the year, and invested heavily in his lands, but was forced to sell land from the 1880s and saw two of his bailiffs killed in what became known as the Lough Mask Murders in January 1882. His attempt to preserve the landscape at Muckross, Killarney from 1899 for aesthetic reasons was under challenge as soon as 1905. With the Digby family he was a joint owner of the Aran Islands that were compulsorily purchased by the Congested Districts Board in 1916. Philanthropy Ardilaun was, like many in the Guinness family, a generous philanthropist, devoting himself to a number of public causes, including the restoration of Marsh's Library in Dublin and the extension of the city's Coombe Women's Hospital. In buying and keeping intact the estate around Muckross House in 1899, he assisted the movement to preserve the lake and mountain landscape around Killarney, now a major tourist destination. From 1875 he was a sponsor of the "Dublin Artizan's Dwellings Company", which built cottages for poor Dubliners at reasonable rents, and was the forerunner of the Iveagh Trust later set up by his brother Edward. In his best-known achievement, he also bought, landscaped, and gave to the capital, the central public park of St Stephen's Green, where his statue commissioned by the city can be seen opposite the Royal College of Surgeons.