A former gate lodge to Elm Park, otherwise known as Clarina Park, County Limerick. Designed by brothers James and George Pain, the house here was built 1833-36 for Eyre Massey, third Baron Clarina following the latter’s marriage to 18-year old heiress Susan Barton (her father was the Hiberno-French wine baron Hugh Barton). Built at the cost of £50,000 with an abundance of towers and castellations, Elm Park was demolished in the early 1960s. Today this lodge, the carriageway since enclosed to increase accommodation, is one of the few extant buildings to give a tantalising hint of the lost house’s appearance.
A relative of Eyre Massy, Captain Eyre Massey Shaw, was the first Chief Fire Officer of London Fire Brigade. He also gets a mention in a Gilbert and Sullivan Opera
Are you aware of another ‘Elm Park’ in County Armagh? The house still stands, however long since inhabited. It was used as a celebrated elite country house prep school from the 1920’s – 1950’s. There are some interesting & amusing accounts of life in a rural Irish Boarding School which may warrant a future pithy post.
Thank you, I wasn’t aware of Elm Park, County Armagh: by the way, I presume you mean ‘uninhabited’? And yes, accounts of boarding school life in Ireland would make an amusing piece – a lot of them sound rather like the one where Paul Pennyfeather teaches in Waugh’s Decline and Fall…
Quite right, in my haste I omitted the ‘un’: festive preparations have resulted in some rather frenzied finger work! Perhaps not quite as manic an existence as poor Mr Pennyfeather, but absorbing none the less. ‘Decline and Fall’ would provide such an excellent title for such a piece.