Lady Olivia Hedges-White was born at Macroom Castle, County Cork in August 1850. Her father, the Hon William Henry Hare Hedges-White was the second son of the first Earl of Bantry; he had added Hedges to his own surname in 1840 on inheriting the Macroom estate from a cousin, Robert Hedges Eyre. Following the death of his elder brother, the second Earl of Bantry, in 1868 William Hedges-White also succeeded to the Bantry estates, meaning he owned almost 70,000 acres of land in the county (for more on Bantry and the White family, see When It’s Gone, It’s Gone, September 8th last). The third earl married Jane Herbert whose family had owned the Muckross estate in neighbouring County Kerry since the mid-1650s: when the Herberts became immured in debt in the late 1890s, Muckross would be bought by Lady Olive’s husband. She had been the first of the third Earl of Bantry’s daughters to marry, followed in 1874 by her elder sister Lady Elizabeth to Egerton Leigh and then in 1885 by her younger sister Lady Ina to Sewallis Edward Shirley, 10th Earl Ferrers. Lady Olive’s husband, who she married in February 1871, was Sir Arthur Edward Guinness. Arthur Edward Guinness was the eldest son of Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, first baronet, who greatly expanded the brewery in Dublin and thereby enhanced the family’s fortunes. He married his cousin Elizabeth Guinness with whom he had four children. Arthur Guinness might have been expected to enter the business like his father before him, but in fact he left this task to his younger brother Edward (later first Earl of Iveagh) to whom he sold his half-share of the brewery in 1876. Arthur Guinness’s interests were political and he was elected to his father’s seat in Parliament following a by-election after the latter’s death in 1868. He retained his place at a General Election the same year; unfortunately it was subsequently discovered his agent had bribed an elector and so he was forced to give up the seat. He was re-elected again in 1874 and remained a committed Unionist MP (and lifelong opponent of Home Rule) until raised to the peerage in 1880 as Baron Ardilaun. In 1852 Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness bought the Ashford estate on the shores of Ireland’s second largest lake, Lough Corrib, in County Galway. The house at its centre was originally a de Burgo castle and then a shooting lodge belonging to the Browne family. However in the aftermath of the Great Famine the first Lord Oranmore and Browne had been forced to sell the greater part of his land holdings; Ashford and its surrounding 1,179 acres were acquired through the Encumbered Estates Court by the Guinnesses for £11,005. Benjamin Lee and then Arthur Edward greatly enlarged both the house and estate, the latter eventually covering some 33,000 acres, much of which benefitted from judicious tree planting. As for the building, this likewise increased in size from 1873 onwards when Arthur Edward Guinness commissioned a large west wing designed initially by James Franklin Fuller and – following a deterioration in the relationship between architect and client – George Ashlin; by 1915 £1 million had been spent on this project. The new work connected the 18th-century chateau-style lodge of the Brownes with two de Burgo towers and then the greater part of the structure was encased in battlements so that the whole became known as Ashford Castle. Recalling a visit he made there in the 1880s, George Moore would later write, ‘Below us, falling in sweet inclining plain, a sea of green turf flows in and out of stone walls and occasional clumps of trees down to the rocky promontories, the reedy reaches and the long curved woods which sweep about the castle – such a castle as Gautier would have loved to describe – that Lord Ardilaun has built on this beautiful Irish land. There it stands on that green headland with the billows of a tideless sea, lashing about its base; and oh! the towers and battlements rising out of the bending foliage.’ Ashford was never a permanent residence for the Guinness family but used during winter months for shooting parties and as somewhere to entertain large groups of friends. The photographs above give an idea of such occasions; the first of them, taken in October 1878, featurs a young Oscar Wilde (whose father had a place on Lough Corrib) leaning on a balustrade on the extreme right. Even before his marriage, Arthur Edward Guinness would host weekends in the house, one of which was recorded in a privately-printed book, A Lay of Ashford, which seems to date from around 1869/70. Text and drawings were both by Colonel James O’Hara who lived with his wife and child at Lenaboy Castle on the outskirts of Galway city, a property only built earlier in the decade to the design of Samuel Ussher Roberts (grandson of the famous 18th century Waterford architect John Roberts). The book describes the entertainment laid on for the guests, not least the creation of a temporary ballroom so that a dance could be held for them. There was also boating on the lake and a picnic. Among those present who have been identified were the host’s youngest brother, Captain Lee Guinness, David Plunket, later first Lord Rathmore (whose older brother was married to the host’s aunt), Lord and Lady Clanmorris, Lord and Lady John Manners, Robert Algernon Persse of Roxborough, County Galway (a brother of Augusta, Lady Gregory), Miss Alice Eyre of Eyrecourt and sundry other members of local families: all appear in Colonel O’Hara’s book, as does Ashford itself before the house was so extensively altered. Olive Ardilaun liked to paint, and collected her watercolour in a bound album. Most of them depict the landscape around Ashford but as can be seen in the first painting above, she also reproduced scenes from the family house on the north side of Dublin Bay. This was St Anne’s, originally called Thornhill, an 18th century property which Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness had bought with fifty-two acres in 1835 from John Venables Vernon of neighbouring Clontarf Castle. The old house was pulled down in 1850 and replaced with another in the Italianate style. At the same time the name was changed to St Anne’s (after an old well on the site) and more land acquired so that the grounds eventually amounted to some 500 acres. As at Ashford, from 1873 onwards Arthur and Olive Guinness embarked on an ambitious extension to the main house, once more using the designs of James Franklin Fuller. The result, Mark Bence-Jones later wrote was ‘a palace comparable to the best of the mansions that were being built at that period in the USA by people like the Vanderbilts, in taste no less than in grandeur.’ This, the Ardilauns’ main residence, was where they held parties and balls during the annual season, hosting a house party each year during the week of the Dublin Horse Show and entertaining visiting dignitaries, not least Queen Victoria who came here for dinner in April 1900 (the future George V’s signature and that of his wife Mary can be seen in the visitors’ book for August 22nd 1897; he would spend a week shooting at Ashford in 1905). Even during their lifetimes, the hospitality offered by the Ardilauns was exceptional: few if any other Irish landowners had the income to entertain in such a grand manner. And with the dawn of the new century and changes in this country’s economic and political circumstances they increasingly became anachronisms, reflections of another era. Lord Ardilaun died in January 1915 but his wife lived another decade. The couple had no offspring and the widowed Lady Ardilaun, while materially comfortable, was an isolated figure during her final years: Lady Gregory described her as ‘a lonely figure in her wealth, childless and feeling the old life shattered around her.’ She gave up Ashford which went to her husband’s nephew, the Hon Ernest Guinness, and Macroom Castle, which she had inherited from her father and to which she was devoted as a descendant of the original MacCarthy family, was burnt out by Anti-Treaty forces during the Civil War; the grounds were sold to a group of local businessmen two years later. In a 1949 memoir Bricks and Flowers, her cousin Katherine Everett (née Herbert) gives a description of Lady Ardilaun at this time, fearful of the world in which she now found herself and, despite the Guinness money, occupying an increasingly decrepit St Anne’s, its gardens falling into decay, the roof of the winter garden leaking whenever it rained, the quantity of water sometimes so great it would knock out the central heating boiler in the basement. When the cold and damp became too intense, she would move with her maid and secretary to the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. Lady Ardilaun finally died in December 1925 at the age of 75. All the pictures shown here come from a series of albums being sold by Adam’s at this year’s Country House Collections auction in Slane Castle, County Meath next Sunday and Monday, 12th and 13th October. For more information, please see: http://www.adams.ie/Country-House-Collections-at-Slane-Castle/12-10-2014?gridtype=listview