Blenheim house is situated just off the R683 . Blenheim house has been operating as a bed and breakfast for 30 years.  Blenheim house is a large Georgian residence built in 1763 It stands on 4 acres of lawns, shrubbery and private deer park. It offers its visitors an opportunity to experience the grandure of days gone by with the comforts of the present. Blenheim house is furnished throughout with antiques and objects d'art. Blenheim House offers its guests the quietness of the countryside while still only ten minutes drive from Waterford City. All rooms have private bathroom/shower en suite. Blenheim House is open all year round.

The hill on the opposite side of the road from Mount Druid is marked on the Richards and Scalé map of 1764 as Blenheim Hill.  Why Blenheim?  The short answer is that we do not know.  To an English-speaker, the name Blenheim (pronounced Blennim) is forever associated with the great battle fought way back in 1704 between the English and their German allies against the French near the village of Blindheim.  It was the first and greatest of four victories won by the Great Duke of Marlborough, and brought him a sizeable financial reward from a grateful parliament, thus enabling him to build himself a nice country pad in Oxfordshire – the huge and spectacular Blenheim Palace. That said and done, the battle produced enormous casualties on both sides and achieved ….. well, not a lot.
Later generations of English-speaking schoolboys learned by heart Robert Southey’s poem about the battle, written in 1798, in which “old Kaspar” who lives on the battle-site explains to his grandchildren why he keeps on digging up skulls.  Teachers may have hoped to imbue their little charges with patriotic zeal, failing to spot the irony in what is actually an anti-war poem:

“And everybody praised the Duke
            Who this great fight did win.”
“But what good came of it at last?”
            Quoth little Peterkin.
“Why, that I cannot tell,” said he,
“But ….. ‘twas a famous victory.”

            Opposite Mount Druid, beside the present Halfway House shop, a lane leads us to three attractive villas, all confusingly bearing the name Blenheim.  In the early 19th century they were occupied by three families prominent in the trade of Waterford, each of whom coincidentally represented one of the three main religious traditions – the Ridgways (Quaker), the Sweetmans (Roman Catholic) and the Cottoms (Church of Ireland).
            Henry Ridgway belonged to a Quaker family of Mountmellick in Queen’s County (Co. Laois).  He settled in Waterford as a merchant in 1765 and entered into partnership with the Strangmans and Courtenays, forming a company which by the end of the century was dominant in the trade ofWaterford.  In 1775 he married a daughter of George Penrose of Brook Lodge, an alliance that evidently brought further prosperity, and in 1793 leased from the Marquess of Waterford part of the lands of Ballymaclode, on which he built Blenheim House.
            Henry died in 1827, and was succeeded by his eldest son George Penrose Ridgway.  George died only five years later, in 1832.  His son and heir Henry married in the following year and settled at Riverview House inNewtown (later the family home of Field Marshal Lord Roberts), leaving his widowed mother and his sisters at Blenheim.  In 1857 the Ridgway family surrendered their lease of Blenheim and Lord Waterford rented it out to Henry Davis, of whom Robert Dobbyn has the following amusing entry in his diary: