An Irish Childhood

Sep29

‘A four-year-old child sits on her father’s knee, in the pony-trap, holding the reins. She is conscious of the touch of his hand guiding her own, the rough texture of the sleeve of his jacket, the pony’s silvery white haunches moving to the rythym of a steady trot, its alert pricked ears, the polished harness, the rings, buckles and mounts. Presently at a curve of the avenue Mount John comes into view: solid, cream-coloured house, its low-pitched blue lead roof just visible above the parapet. From this angle it is partly hidden by trees – among them a copper beech, a tall bluish green Wellingtonia tapering to a point, a monkey puzzle and a walnut tree. Only when the trap has passed between the white gate-posts on the half-circle of gravel, to the left the pleasure ground, to the right a weeping ash, can one see to advantage the sash windows – two either side the hall-door, matched by similar pairs above and an additional window over the fanlight; the slim Ionic pillars; the oak door and the shining brass knocker that on closer inspection reveals itself as a Greek urn narrowing to the base where the hand takes hold.’

‘Mount John was built in the early seventeen hundreds. Like many other Irish houses belonging to the same period – when the settlers began to embellish the country that hitherto they had ravaged, building themselves homes of distinction – it combines solidity with a spacious elegance. The walls are thick – in places several feet in width. I remember a great bulge by the landing window; another in the bathroom wall in which, if I am to believe an old cottager – he worked for my father and still lives on the Wicklow road – part of the Russian crown jewels are concealed.
In common with other houses designed not in isolation, but in a manner that has regard for the landscape – house and landscape making a single picture – it is seen at its best from a distance. There is a pleasing view from the road, through a gap between beeches and limes – the house standing above a sweep of lawn, set about by trees and shrubs, and, beyond it, a glimpse of mountains. Even so it looks smaller than it is – an illusion created by a facade broken by the relatively few flat windows. Inside, one is taken unawares by the spaciousness, whether it be the airy hall, the curving staircase, or the rooms with their high ceilings, pleasant proportions and the light coming in the tall windows. It seems to hold within itself something of the largeness and the quiet of the countryside.’

‘The drawing-room was a golden room. The curtains were old-gold with a flutter of white muslin, rhe carpet a similar, deeper shade. The sun poured in the tall windows of which two faced east, the third south on to the pleasure ground – picking out the gilded oval frames enclosing portraits of my Hamilton grandparents and over the mantelshelf a gilt-edged mirror. There was a sofa upholstered in a rich gilded brocade; two yellow wooden chairs with painted on the back of each a bouquet of flowers tied with a ribbon – the tiny blossoms picked out in red and blue and violet; and in front of the piano a stool with ends similarly decorated. My mother’s Sheraton writing desk stood in one corner, and in the window as you came into the room there was a Sheraton table massed in spring with daffodils in a crystal bowl, in summer with golden-pink Gloire de Dijon roses, in autumn with chrysanthemums. I remember on the same table a tortoise-shell paper knife, a busby chain, regimental badges, a pair of spurs and a number of small silver objects that included a windmill, a filigree round table with chairs to match, a poodle dog with a leg missing. The white Adam’s mantelshelf was decorated with a carving of two gryphons staring at each other and on the side panels acanthus flowers rising on twirling stems from a Greek urn.’

‘It is an evening in spring. The hall-door is open – as it often was, so that the house used to be permeated with the scents and freshness of the garden. The light is a pale silver, as after rain. A breeze sirs one of the West African fetish masks (relics of my father’s soldiering days) making it sway and scrape against the red-washed wall above an oak table on which there is a black-and-gold lacquer tray for visiting cards and, behind this, a pair of elephant’s tusks crossing each other. My mother comes in from the garden with violets in her hand. She holds them out to me to smell, then lays them on the table and sighing (not plaintively, but as if in satisfaction at a task well done) slips her slender, ringed hands out of a pair of crumpled gardening gloves. Spring in childhood has become crystallised in this memory of the open door, the silvery light, the scraping of the fetish mask against the wall, my mother holding out the violets.’

‘A path ran north of the house through the shrubbery to the faded greenish blue garden door set in a wall and opening on to a box-edged path arched with ramblers. To the right was a deep border brilliant with flowers: maroon and lemon and sapphire columbines – these backed by a hedge of beech on the further side of which was a paddock where my mother kept her poultry. There were more flowers to the left of the path: deep blue cornflowers, love-in-a-mist, sweet Williams, bachelors’ buttons, flame-bright montbretia and a double row of sweet-peas. And, beyond these, raspberries and currants and strawberry beds. There was an apple tree with a twisted trunk and crumpled lichen-coated branches. Overnight – so it used to seem to us – it became in the spring a could of blossom soon to drift away upon the wind.’

The above extracts are taken from Elizabeth Hamilton’s 1963 memoir An Irish Childhood, telling the story of a period before the First World War when she and her family lived at Mount John, County Wicklow. The author’s parents had both grown up in County Meath but her father, as a younger son, did not inherit property there and so bought another small estate. For many years owned by generations of Archers, Mount John appears to have been built over several phases, the rear portion probably being the earlier part to which the east-facing front with its large reception rooms was added some time around 1800. A feature of the facade is its finish of vertically hung slate, which have long been painted white. On either side of this section of the building are bows, that to the north two-storeys high, that to the south (off the drawing room) single-storey.
Financial circumstances forced Elizabeth Hamilton’s parents to leave Mount John in early 1914 and her book is an evocation of a lost Arcadia, a magical world she recalled for the rest of her life. An Irish Childhood, with its charming line drawings by Norah McGuinness, is too little known; the work provides readers with an insight into life in Ireland across all sections of society just before the onset of the upheavals that so changed this country. Many years later the author returned to Mount John and, having walked once more around the place where she had been born and spent her earliest years, she wrote ‘As I went through the white gate into the dusk it was as though there had been a transference of time. A moment belonging to a past beyond the reach of my memory, yet familiar from hearsay, had stepped forward into the present…’

Mount John, County Wicklow is now for sale, and waiting to be brought back to the condition so redolently described by Elizabeth Hamilton. For more information, see: http://www.sherryfitz.ie/resi/buy/7-bed-Farms-and-Estates-For-Sale-by-Private-Treaty-Newcastle-Mount-John-House-Newcastle-Co.-Wicklow-propertydetail.aspx?id=328894&ST=1&pc=1

Bridging Cultures

Sep27

The ‘Hindu Gate’ at Dromana, County Waterford. This originated as a papiér maché and canvas-covered timber structure erected in 1826 by the tenants of Villierstown to welcome home their newly-wed landlord Henry Villiers-Stuart, later Lord Stuart de Decies, and his Austrian bride Theresia Pauline Ott. Drawings for the present structure dated 1849 were made by Wexford-born architect Martin Day, who carried out other work on the estate. Located on one side of a bridge spanning the river Finnisk, the gate is a entrance lodge, its central arch flanked by chambers. While some elements of the design, such as the decorative glazing bars complimented by quatrefoil-detailed filigree above are a reflection of Georgian gothick, other features – not least the minarets and copper-clad onion dome – appear to owe their inspiration to John Nash’s Royal Pavilion, Brighton built some thirty years earlier. After being restored by the Irish Georgian Society in the late 1960s, the gate was subject to vandalism and had to be repaired again by the local county council in 1990.

Next Wednesday, October 1st I shall be speaking on ‘The Fate of the Irish Country House: A Comparative Study’ at a symposium being held in King’s College, London to mark the fortieth anniversary of the influential 1974 V&A exhibition, The Destruction of the Country House. For more information, see: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/cmci/eventrecords/2014/forty-years-english-heritage-legacy-destruction-country-house.aspx

Welcome to My World

Sep24

Cupids play at the top of a blind niche in the rotunda of Townley Hall, County Louth, one of the loveliest houses in Ireland which has been discussed here on several occasions in the past (mostly notably Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté* on June 10th last year). Today marks the second anniversary of The Irish Aesthete, the first post being made on September 24th 2012. Two years later the site remains busy with at least three postings each week and, I am happy to report, an ever-increasing audience. In 2012 The Irish Aesthete received an average 23 views per day: the site now generates more than 610 views daily. Interest comes from across the world, the majority of visitors understandably resident in English-speaking countries but during the last quarter there have been substantial numbers from Brazil, the Russian Federation, Turkey and Vietnam, among many others.
Whoever you are and wherever you live, thank you to all my readers for engaging with this site and for encouraging me to continue writing about Ireland’s architectural heritage, a subject dear to my heart and evidently to yours also. Your comments are always appreciated, although some of those written in more intemperate language may not be published (this site appreciates good manners). Please keep sending me your thoughts and responses, and in addition if you have suggestions for future subjects, I should be delighted to know of these: like all authors, I relish feedback.
Thank you once again, and I look forward to retaining your interest over the next twelve months.

Their Faithful Representative

Sep23

In the late 18th century, Thomas Dawson, Viscount Cremorne, passed responsibility for his Irish estate Dawson’s Grove, County Monaghan to his heir and nephew, Richard Dawson. To the dismay of his uncle, Richard – who served as a local MP in the Irish parliament – proved to be something of a radical and in 1799 consistently voted against the Act of Union. In the event, he died eight years later (predeceasing Lord Cremorne) after which he was remembered as being ‘the most active in promoting improvements, the most useful and the most popular man this country ever knew.’
As evidence, in the aftermath of his death, a fifty-eight foot high limestone Doric column surmounted by a funerary urn was erected on the edge of the Dawson’s Grove demesne. The arms of the Dawson family appear on two sides of the monument’s square base plinth and the following inscription on the other two sides: ‘This column was erected by the free and independent electors of the county of Monaghan to perpetuate the memory of Richard Dawson Esq., who was unanimously returned by them to five successive parliaments. He died their faithful representative on 3 September 1807, aged 44 years.’ The column, its design attributed to James Wyatt, has been restored in recent years. Dawson’s Grove was eventually inherited by Richard Dawson’s son, another Richard, who in 1813 became Baron Cremorne.

Comfortable in its Own Skin

Sep22

During the immense upheavals that occurred here over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, much of the country’s land changed hands on several occasions. In some instances, this was because those who had come into possession of it, by whatever means, sought to make a quick return on the value of their property, and thus soon sold it on. Others, however, especially if they were English-born younger sons with few prospects of becoming a landowner back home, preferred to remain in Ireland and could enhance their own acreage by acquiring that being disposed of by departing soldiery.
Such seems to have been the case with Francis Jackson, described in the 1875 edition of Burke’s Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland as descended from a branch ‘of the ancient Devonshire family of JACKSON, of Combhay’ who being a younger son had come to this country ‘as captain of dragoons in Cromwell’s army, and purchasing extensive landed property in the Barony of Tyrrawley and county of Mayo, had it shortly after the Restoration, confirmed to him and his heirs by patent of Charles II. He built a large fortified house at Enniscoe, on the banks of Lough Conn.’ Having established himself here, Francis Jackson remained in County Mayo until his death in 1678 when he left a son, Oliver, to inherit the property.

Oliver Jackson died soon after the conclusion of the Williamite Wars in 1691, just as some peace descended on the country. However, one of his two sons John Jackson died as a result of engaging in a duel in 1704 and so the estate went to his brother Oliver Jackson who married a Catherine Owens of County Louth with whom he had three sons, the younger two conveniently dying bachelors and having no offspring. Born in 1717 the eldest child George Jackson married Jane Cuffe whose father James was an MP for Mayo and whose uncle was Arthur Gore, first Earl of Arran: in 1797 her brother James Cuffe would become first (and last) Baron Tyrawley.
It may be because of these connections or because George and Jane Jackson had seven children that they decided to build a new residence at Enniscoe. Hitherto the family had lived in the fortified house erected by Francis Jackson on the shores of Lough Conn, its precise whereabouts now unknown. At some date around 1740-50, this was replaced by another building further from the lake but with views down to the water. This was a tall, single-gabled house of five bays and three storeys over basement.

The eldest of George and Jane Jackson’s progeny, likewise christened George, in 1783 married Maria Rutledge, only child and heir of William Rutledge of nearby Foxford; the couple would have thirteen children. Most likely their large family explains why Enniscoe was enlarged soon after the death the older George Jackson in 1789; work was completed by 1798 when it suffered some damage during the rebellion and failed French invasion of that year (after which William Rutledge lodged a claim for compensation to the government for just over £780 owing to ‘loss of cattle, wine, furniture, provisions and fire arms’). Interestingly the house’s new section was placed directly in front of the old, which still remains intact as the back part of the building today. Changes in taste mean this part of the property has more generously proportioned rooms than those to the rear. It has no basement and is of only two storeys rather than three. The main features are two large reception rooms on either side of the entrance hall with Adam-esque cornice friezes, white marble chimney pieces and an elegantly sinuous top-lit staircase undulating up to the first floor bedrooms.

George and Maria Jackson’s eldest son William, a colonel in the North Mayo Militia, did not match his parents’ fecundity, having only one child with his wife Jane Louise Blair, a daughter named Madeline Eglantine Jackson. On her father’s death she thus became an heiress and in 1834 married another large landowner, from the other side of the country, Mervyn Pratt of Cabra Castle, County Cavan. The Pratts, like the Jacksons, established themselves in Ireland in the first half of the 17th century, Joseph Pratt of Leicestershire having settled here in 1641. The marriage of these two families meant that in 1876 Mervyn Pratt was listed as owning 17,955 acres in County Mayo, 8,095 acres in County Cavan and 1,014 acres in County Meath. This was inherited by Mervyn and Madeline Pratt’s only son Joseph who in turn passed the properties on to his elder son, another Mervyn: the younger boy, Lieutenant Colonel Audley Pratt was killed during the First World War. Born in 1873, Mervyn Pratt was badly wounded during the Boer War and retired from the King’s Royal Rifle Corps with the rank of Captin in 1910; he was subsequently promoted to Major. On his father’s death, he moved to Enniscoe and remained there unmarried until his own death in 1950. At that date the County Mayo property was inherited by a cousin, Professor Jack Nicholson, head of the Veterinary College of Ireland and his wife Patita, whose father had been one of the Bourkes of Heathfield House, County Mayo (a family of which Ireland’s first woman President, Mary Robinson was also a member). Enniscoe in turn passed to their daughter Susan Kellett who now lives there with her son, DJ Kellett.

The particular pleasure of Enniscoe lies in its discretion: there is nothing braggartly about the house which sits at ease within the surrounding landscape. Patita Nicholson, a talented artist too little known, painted many scenes featuring the property (such as that at the top of this page). All of them show Enniscoe’s roughcast walls washed a gentle pink, this colour contrasting with the intense green of the immediate meadows and woodlands. Aside from a tripartite entrance doorframe, the exterior of the building is plain and the interiors likewise devoid of superfluous decoration except for occasional flourishes such as the plasterwork frieze running around the base of the staircase lantern. The sensible caution of earlier generations towards spending money unnecessarily means Enniscoe has remained relatively unchanged over the past two centuries. In the drawing room, for example, the wall paper probably dates from the 1830s when Madeline Jackson married Mervyn Pratt and the couple undertook some redecoration, although after almost two hundred years the original pale blue has faded to a dusty rose. And for nearly double that amount of time the house has never been sold but instead passed on from one branch of the same family to the next. The character this unbroken continuity gives to a house cannot be artificially replicated, but can – and in other houses has been – forever lost. There are few remaining examples in Ireland of somewhere grown quite so comfortable in its own skin, long may Enniscoe continue to do so.

Enniscoe and its owners today welcome guests. For more information, please see http://www.enniscoe.com

The End is Nigh…

Sep20

Around the corner from St Catherine’s church on Thomas Street, Dublin and indeed integrated into that building is this residence on Thomas Court, probably the former presbytery. The Gibbsian doorcase and carriage arch are typical of the 1760s when the church was rebuilt to John Smyth’s design and according to Graham Hickey of the Dublin Civic Trust, ‘the L-shaped plan of the house accords with John Rocque’s depiction of the site on his map of 1756, before the church was rebuilt, lending the tantalising possibility that it incorporates early fabric. It almost certainly contains recycled material from the previous building. It has since lost its original roof to a flat 20th-century affair.’
Seriously altered in the second half of the last century when converted into a number of residential units, the building then suffered damage as a result of a fire last winter. It now looks to be in very poor state and unless remedial work is undertaken soon the only outcome will be further decline and, as has happened far too often in this country, the threat of demolition due to claims of the property being in dangerous condition.

‘A Man of Gravity and Virtuous Conversation’

Sep17

A pair of figures on the tomb of Walter Wellesley, penultimate Prior of Great Connell, County Kildare, a religious house belonging to the Augustinian canons. Judged a man of both exceptional learning and political wisdom, Wellesley, who became Bishop of Kildare in 1529, had sufficient influence with Henry VIII to ensure the survival of Great Connell during the following decade when other religious houses were being suppressed. When he died in 1539 this tomb was erected in his memory but the following year the priory was closed down and its occupants dispersed. The buildings subsequently passed into other hands and in the early 19th century much of the original masonry was used to construct a military barracks in Newbridge. At that time surviving fragments of Bishop Wellesley’s tomb were incoporated into the wall of a graveyard at Great Connell where they remained until 1971 when removed to St Brigid’s Cathedral, Kildare. There they remain in the south transept although portions of the tomb have never been recovered.

A Shining Distinction on Earth

Sep15

The Dawson family of County Monaghan came from Yorkshire to Ireland during the reign of Elizabeth I, Thomas Dawson becoming a Burgess of Armagh. Subsequently Richard Dawson, a Cromwellian cornet of horse, assembled the nucleus of the family’s estate in the 1650s and 1660s through the acquisition of thirty-one townlands, based around a property called Dawson’s Grove on the banks of a chain of lakes separating counties Cavan and Monaghan. Richard Dawson’s only child, a daughter named Frances, married her cousin Walter Dawson. Their son Richard was an Alderman of Dublin, an MP for County Kilkenny and the owner of a family bank. He further expanded the estates both in County Monaghan and elsewhere. With his wife Elizabeth, daughter of John Vesey, Archbishop of Tuam, he had four children, their third son being Thomas Dawson born in 1725. After coming into his inheritance the latter built a new house at Dawson’s Grove in the early 1770s and also bought and redeveloped a residence in London, Cremorne House, Chelsea where the garden designer Nathaniel Richmond was commissioned to lay out the grounds (although the house is long gone, this is now the site of Cremorne Gardens, just down river from Battersea Bridge). In May 1770 Thomas Dawson was created Baron Dartrey of Dawson’s Grove, and in June 1785 Viscount Cremorne.

In August 1754 Thomas Dawson married Lady Anne Fermor, youngest daughter of the first Earl of Pomfret, with whom he had two children before she died in March 1769. Her husband’s grief was considerable, but not so great as to prevent his marrying just over a year later Philadelphia Hannah Freame. She was the granddaughter of William Penn, whose family owned land in County Cork but who is better known as the founder of Pennsylvania. By his second marriage to Hannah Callowhill William Penn had eight children one of whom, Thomas Penn, married Lady Juliana Fermor, eldest daughter of Lord Pomfret. This explains how Thomas Dawson should have met his second wife Philadelphia, whose mother Margaret Freame, was another of William Penn’s children. In other words, he married his first wife’s niece. And, as her name indicates, she was born in the city of Philadelphia in 1740.

Philadelphia Freame’s marriage to Thomas Dawson was marked by the building of a house for the Dartrey estate’s agent, Charles Mayne, which was then given the name Freame Mount. Lady Anne Fermor, however, was commemorated in a more original fashion with the construction of a mausoleum which stands in the middle of Black Island on raised ground facing the former site of Dawson’s Grove. Based on a surviving elevation for the west front which shows the inspiration of the Pantheon in Rome, the design of the Dartrey Mausoleum has been attributed to James Wyatt, making it the English architect’s first commission in Ireland and contemporaneous with Wyatt’s Pantheon, the famous assembly rooms on London’s Oxford Street.
The building in Monaghan is a tall, square block built of locally-fired red brick raised on a limestone plinth. The exterior, featuring a sequence of blind windows and oculi, is relieved on the western front (which would have been visible from Dawson’s Grove) by a shallow tetrastyle portico with four pilasters (note their unusual fluted capitals) beneath a pedimented entablature. Above this cube rises a dome, its open centre providing the only light for the interior which would have been even more dramatic when viewed on nights with a full moon.

In August 1774 the Dublin Hibernian Journal reported, ‘A few days ago was landed in Dublin a beautiful Marble Monument done by Joseph Wilton, Esq., of Portland Street, London, which Lord Dartrey is to erect in a Temple at his seat in Co. Monaghan, to the memory of his late wife, Lady Anne Dawson, daughter of the late Earl of Pomfret.’ The London-born Wilton, a founder-member of the Royal Academy, had in 1764 been appointed ‘Sculptor to his Majesty’ by George III. His funerary monument in the Dartrey Mausoleum, for which he was paid 1,000 guineas, is the only commission he received in Ireland; during the same period he also sculpted a bust of Thomas Dawson, now in the Yale Center for British Art.
Like that piece, Wilton’s work inside the mausoleum is carved in Carrara marble and was installed against the eastern wall above a plain altar. A plaque recalls both Lady Anne, described as possessing ‘all the external Advantages which contribute to form a shining Distinction on Earth’, and the couple’s prematurely deceased daughter Henrietta Anne ‘who lived long enough to justify all the fairest Hopes of a Mother.’ To one side of a large funerary urn are the lifesize figures of Lady Anne’s grieving husband and their young son clinging to his father in both terror and sorrow; the pair of them gaze up at the hovering form of an interceding angel. It is a remarkably theatrical piece of work, and must have been especially effective when seen by moonlight.

The subsequent fortunes of the Dartrey Mausoleum have been mixed. At some date in the 19th century, the dome was taken, or fell, down and replaced with a shallow slated pyramidal roof, and the brick walls plastered. The last member of the Dawson family to live at Dartrey, Lady Edith Windham, eldest child of the second Earl of Dartrey, sold the estate in 1946 to the Irish Forestry Commission (now Coillte) which continues to own the land on which the mausoleum stands. Dawson’s Grove, rebuilt in the 1840s as Dartrey Castle, was demolished and the view across to Black Island obscured by dense planting of evergreen woodland. Meanwhile the mausoleum was left to languish and although the Irish Georgian Society undertook some repairs in the 1960s, the building succumbed to decay, its roof was lost and the sculptural group – as can be seen in photographs above – seriously vandalised.
Such might have remained the case, had it not been for the energy, imagination and commitment of a local group, the Dartrey Heritage Association which over the past decade has steadily worked to ensure the restoration of this outstanding monument. Securing funding from a variety of sources, including the local County Council, the Heritage Council and once more the Irish Georgian Society, together with monies raised by other means, the DHA has now almost completed this project. The building is once more intact and with a domed roof, and inside the sculptural group has been repaired with missing sections scrupulously replaced. The entire project is a wonderful testament to what can be achievied by a local voluntary body with sufficient determination and persistence, and ought to serve as an example for others throughout the country. Above all the restoration of the Dartrey Mausoleum shows that nothing is beyond salvation, provided the will is there.

Refined Rusticity

Sep13

The idiosyncratic entrance to Bracklyn, County Westmeath, described by Alistair Rowan and Christine Casey as a ‘fantastic neo-mannerist composition of rocks and arches.’ It might also be judged an essay in rustic Palladianism since the building, executed in unhewn limestone, is centred on an archway with pyramidal bellcote above. This is then extended by matching chambers to either side – each topped by a pair of obelisks – before concluding in two smaller pinnacled structures. A shield above the bellcote arch bears the date 1821. With two rooms presumably serving as a lodge it looks more like a grotto than the entrance to a grand country house.

Deserving of Charity

Sep10

A terrace of four houses, those at either end having advanced and pedimented bays, in Rockcorry, County Monaghan. A plaque in each pediment advises ‘These houses were built by Jos. Griffiths for destitute widows A.D. 1847.’ Solidly built with rusticated quoins and red-brick trim around doors and windows, the terrace now stands empty and itself faces destitution. Here is a building that, having served the local community for many years, is today in turn deserving of charity.

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Monthly Archives: September 2014