In 1718 Thomas Willcox left Exeter in Devon, and together with his wife Elizabeth, moved to the American colonies. The couple, who had nine children, settled in the Concord Township of Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Here Willcox and a business partner established a paper mill in 1726, the Ivy Mills, today judged to be the second oldest such industry in the United States. It flourished over the coming decades, receiving the first order for paper used in the production of colonial currency: after 1775 the mill’s output was almost entirely devoted to producing paper for such purposes. When the American Revolution began, the Ivy Mill provided paper for currency printed first by the Continental and then the United States governments (Thomas Willcox was a friend of Benjamin Franklin). Interestingly, the Willcox family was always Roman Catholic and are believed to be the oldest members of that faith in Pennsylvania. They established a Mission chapel at the mill in 1730 and provided support for Jesuit priests travelling through this part of the country. The Ivy Mills remained in operation until 1866.

Arthur Valentine Willcox was born in February 1865, a great, great-grandson of Thomas Willcox. He was responsible for building the house seen here: Lisnabrucka, County Galway, which sits above a Connemara lake of the same name. A Philadelphia banker, Willcox was evidently a keen fisherman since in 1910 he invited Dublin architect Laurence McDonnell to design him a new lodge here. McDonnell, who early in his career had worked for both Thomas Newenham Deane and John Franklin Fuller, was responsible for designing the ‘Irish Village’ constructed at Chicago’s World Fair in 1892 before going on to enjoy a flourishing practice closer to home: he seems to have been responsible for quite a number of new buildings on Dublin’s Grafton Street. In 1908 he had undertaken extensive alterations to Ballynahinch Castle, which is only a few miles from Lisnabrucka, and this may explain why Willcox then in turn used the same architect for his own fishing lodge. The surrounding grounds were extensively landscaped during the same period: an article carried by Irish Gardening in January 1917 describes how ‘year by year the process of turning the bare slopes of the hill into wood and garden proceeds. The view from the house across the lake to Ben Lettery is probably unsurpassed by any other…’

Writing of Irish sporting lodges in Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies (Vol.VII, 2004), Patrick Boew noted that such buildings were intended ‘to accommodate a party of friends rather than a family for which a permanent residence might be designed.’ Furthermore its interior decoration ‘reflected the fact that field sports tended to be the preserve, though not the exclusive property, of men. The internal decoration of a lodge was utilitarian and sufficiently sturdy to withstand the heavy wear expected from occupants kitted for outdoor life.’ Such is the case with Lisnabrucka, which as was often the case, has a long facade (of nine bays) and appears to be of one storey with dormer windows inserted into the mansard roof. In fact, the building is more substantial, the sloping site allowing for another, lower storey on the side facing the lake, and upstairs a long corridor off which open a considerable number of bedrooms, although these – as Bowe again notes was customarily the case – are all rather small and narrow. The focus is on the main floor’s reception rooms, in particular a large entrance hall off which open the dining room, drawing room and study, along with sundry service spaces, not least a big kitchen (those sportsmen had substantial appetites). The plain rendered exterior is relieved by a series of concrete columns with Ionic capitals, the whole centred on a door with Tuscan columns supporting a pediment. Lisnabrucka was built at a time when radical social and political change seemed unlikely, but within a decade Ireland would be a fundamentally different country making the construction, or even survival, of such places highly unlikely. This one endured and over the past century, both inside and out has changed very little. As a result it can be deemed a rare surviving example of the Edwardian sporting lodge.