Monthly Archives: February 2023

Walled In


Rowallane, County Down was given its present name in the second half of the 19th century by a Church of Ireland clergyman, the Rev.John Robert Moore; he was inspired by Rowallan Castle in Ayrshire, whence his Muir ancestors were said to have come. In Ireland, the Moores acted as agents for the Annesley family and for a number of years the Rev Moore served in that role: his sister, in 1828 his younger sister Priscilla Cecilia married the third Earl Annesley, but following the latter’s death ten years later, her brother took over much of the responsibility for the widow and her young children. Castlewellan having not yet been built, at the time, the Annesleys were living at Donard Lodge, elsewhere in County Down. Here the Moore siblings, sister and brother, created a splendid garden running to some 80 acres, featuring a hermitage, aviary, shell house, visitors’ dining room, as well as cascades and waterfalls and decorative bridges: one suspects at least part of the inspiration for all this came from Tollymore not far away (see Do the Wright Thing « The Irish Aesthete).  Only once his nephew, the fourth earl, had come of age did the Rev Moore retire as agent and focus on his own interests. The previous year he had married, but just six years later she died. A widower and in his mid-50s, he now decided to embark on creating a home for himself, in 1858 buying 507 acres in the townland of Creevyloughgare just south of the village of Saintfield. Over the following decades, he acquired more land in the area, so that eventually his total hosling was just short of 1,000 acres. 





The land which the Rev Moore bought at Creevyloughgare contained just a modest farmhouse, so one of his first tasks was to provide himself with a more impressive dwelling. Work here started around 1860-61 and was completed in 1864. While larger than its predecessor (parts of which may have been incorporated into the structure) the new house has no grand architectural pretensions, being a long, plain building of two storeys. A single-storey porch with gothic doorcase sits at the centre of the double-gabled facade;; this dates from 1931 when the house was enlarged and remodelled. To the south lies the stable courtyard, begun in 1865 and entreed through a castellated gothic archway, beside which is a tall bell tower, dated 1867. The top of the tower serves as a belvedere, with lancet windows on three sides and an oculus on the fourth, as well as a viewing platform on the top, offering an ample prospect over the surrounding countryside. 





The area between the stableyard and the house at Rowallane is taken up by a walled garden covering just over two acres and divided into two sections. Originally the entire site would have been given over to the production of fruit and vegetables but in the opening decades of the last century these were gradually supplanted by ornamental shrubs, climbers and herbaceous perennials. When the Rev Moore died in 1888, he left the estate for ten years to a nephew, James Hugh Moore Garrett, with the stipulation that Rowallane should then pass to another nephew, Hugh Armytage-Moore on the latter’s 25th birthday in 1898. In the event, Armytage-Moore did not move there for another five years, having – like his uncle and other members of the family before him – acted as agent for the Annesley estate: his sister, another Priscilla Cecilia Moore, had married her cousin, the fifth Earl Annesley (incidentally, another sister was married to composer and artist Percy French). Whereas the Rev Moore had been primarily interested in laying out the demesne at Rowallane – blasting rock to create drives through the property, and then setting up sundry standing stones and ornamental cairns along the routes, as well as establishing many stands of trees throughout the demesne – Armytage-Moore was a plantsman who subscribed to botanical expeditions by the likes of Frank Kingdon-Ward and then benefitted from the discoveries that they made, some of the results of which can still be seen in Rowallane’s walled garden, contentedly sharing space with many indigenous Irish plants, in a model of the Robinsonian-inspired garden. Armytage-Moore died in 1954 and the following year Rowallane was acquired by the National Trust which continues to be responsible for the property. 

En Garde



The facade of Castlegarde, County Limerick, the core of which is a five-storey tower house said to have been in continuous occupation since first constructed by the O’Brien family. After being confiscated by the crown and granted to Sir George Bourchier at the end of the 16th century, the building passed through various hands until 1820 when acquired by Waller O’Grady, a son of Standish O’Grady, future first Viscount Guillamore. Waller O’Grady commissioned the architect siblings James and George Pain to restore and enlarge the building, to which they added a castellated wing as well as restoring the bawn wall and adding a new gatehouse entrance to the site. The last of these has a most curious feature: inside and above the entrance on plinths are  three stone figures, much worn but said to represent Bacchus, Pallas Athene and Aphrodite.  Clearly these sculptures are of an earlier period, but what might have been their origin or how they came to be here looks to be unknown.


Shades of Gray


Few old ruins in Ireland are as dramatically situated as Graystown Castle, County Tipperary. Perched on an outcrop of limestone rock, to its immediate west the land drops steeply towards the Clashawley river, the castle offering views of the surrounding countryside for several miles. There appears to be some dispute about how it came to be called Graystown, one suggestion being that this is a corruption of the name of Raymond le Gros, one of the first Norman knights to arrive in Ireland; he would come to own large swathes of land in the south-east of the country and is said to have been buried at Molana Abbey, County Waterford (see A Diligent Divine « The Irish Aesthete). On the other hand, it seems more likely that a Norman family called de Grey gave their name to the place. The history of Graystown becomes clearer after 1305 when 120 acres of land here was acquired by Henry Laffan, a clerk closely associated with the powerful Butler family. Despite various disturbances and upheavals, he and his descendants would continue to occupy the site for more than 300 years. 




As mentioned, the Laffans were based at Graystown for several centuries, although their relationship with the Butlers appears to have deteriorated: : in 1524, James Laffan of Graystown was among the freeholders of Tipperary, who complained to Henry VIII of the ‘extortions, coyne and livery’ levied on them by Sir James Butler of Kiltinan and Sir Edmond Butler of Cahir as deputies of the Earl of Ormonde. Still, they managed to stay in place. In 1613, Thomas Laffan of Graystown was a member of the Irish Parliament for Tipperary and in 1640 Henry Laffan held some 3,200 acres of land in the area.  In the Civil Survey of 1654, Graystown is described as follows: ‘Upon this land standeth a good castle, a slate house wantinge repaire with a large bawne & severall cabbins.’ Henry Laffan’s son Marcus served as Commissioner of troops and taxes in the barony of Slieveardagh. However, in the following decade, the Laffans’ land was seized from them by the Commonwealth government and the family was transplanted to East Galway, being settled near Ballinasloe. Graystown was granted to one Gyles Cooke who is listed as proprietor of the place in the 1659 Census of Ireland. And thereafter there is little information about the castle: in Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) he mentions its ‘remains’, indicating that the building had become ruinous by that date, as it remains to the present. 




Text here. As mentioned, Graystown Castle is wonderfully sited on the edge of a limestone escarpment, the north-west of the building – where an arched entrance is located – seeming to teeter right on the edge of the outcrop. Some sections of a bawn wall survive but much has been lost, as with the castle itself. This looks to have been a typical tower house from the late 16th/16th centuries, rectangular in form, of four storeys and rising some 60 feet high. A large portion of the south wall has gone, leaving the interior exposed and showing the layout of the different floors and the form of the vaulted chambers on various levels. To the immediate north of the castle is a three-storey gable wall, the only section of what was presumably a later mansion, perhaps constructed by the Laffans in the first half of the 17th century before the country was overwhelmed with warfare and destruction. This must be what survives of the ‘slate house wantinge repaire’ mentioned in the 1654 Civil Survey. The same document also refers to a number of cabins, indicating there was once some kind of village in the immediate vicinity, but of this there is no trace.

Founding Fathers


There seems to be some dispute over who founded a monastery at Drumlane, County Cavan, the two potential candidates being St Columba and Saint Máedóc of Ferns. If the former, then a religious house would have been established here in the mid-sixth century, if the latter then the date would be somewhat later. In any case, not a lot now remains to show how important this monastery had once been; at its height, Drumlane was the richest ecclesiastical establishment in this part of the country. The church is thought to be mid-12th century and in the aftermath of the Reformation continued to be used for services by the Church of Ireland until 1821 when a new church was built and this one unroofed. The adjacent truncated round tower, probably 11th century, is missing its upper section and now rises 38 feet.


Abandoned


In August 1189 William Marshall married Isabel de Clare, heiress of Richard de Clare, otherwise known as Strongbow, and through his wife came to be one of the greatest Anglo-Norman landowners in Ireland. The couple would have ten children, five of them sons, which would seem to have secured the family’s future, except for a bishop’s curse. At some date between 1207 and 1213, Marshall, by then Earl of Pembroke, seized two manors belonging to Albin O’Molloy (Ailbe Ua Maíl Mhuaidh) and refused to return them. For this slight, O’Molloy excommunicated him and, in the aftermath of Marshall’s death, when his children still held onto the manors, the bishop is supposed to have laid a curse on them, declaring that none of the sons would have heirs and that the great Marshall estates would be scattered. And so it came to pass: although each of the five brothers became Earl of Pembroke, they all died without legitimate children and eventually their father’s property was divided between their sisters and the latters’ children, leading to the break-up of the great Marshall estate, just as the Bishop of Ferns had declared. 






Around 1207 Maud, eldest daughter of William Marshall and Isabel de Clare, married Hugh Bigod, third Earl of Norfolk: incidentally, it was through this marriage that the position of Earl Marshall of England would come to be held by the Dukes of Norfolk. Furthermore, as a result of the marriage, the Bigods came to own large areas of land in what is now County Carlow and when Roger, fifth Earl of Norfolk visited Ireland in 1279, it is thought that he embarked on constructing a large stronghold for himself, now known as Ballymoon Castle, the remains of which can be seen here. In his book on the Bigods during the 13th century, Marc Morris proposes that the building’s purpose was not intended to be defensive. ‘Built on a scale which presupposes a patron in need of extensive accommodation and with considerable resources at his disposal,’ Ballymoon was ‘intended to function as a residence more than a fortress.’ Morris points out that there is no ditch around the site and no projecting towers; the only breakfronts on the walls contained latrines. A cousin of the MacMurroughs, with whom he seems to have been on good terms, Roger Bigod did not face militant opposition on Carlow, hence there was no need for a protective citadel. 






Ballymoon Castle consists of a single square courtyard about 80 feet long on each side, the rough-hewn granite outer walls being some eight feet thick at the base and climbing 20 feet, although their uneven appearance indicates they were once higher and perhaps finished with crenellations and walks. The big, empty courtyard has the remains of buildings on each of its four sides, some of which indicate where doors or chimneypieces were once placed. The western wall has an arched gateway with portcullis grooves visible, and there are quite a few cross-shaped openings around the other walls. It may be that work here was never finished: by the autumn of 1280 Roger Bigod was back in England. And two years later, his cousins, Art and Muchertach MacMurrough, were murdered in Arklow on the instructions of the Justiciar of Ireland, Stephen de Fulbourn. When Roger Bigod died in 1306, despite two marriages, like his Marshall forebears he had no heirs, so the direct line ended, his lands were escheated to the crown and eventually bestowed on Thomas of Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk, a younger son of Edward I. Little is known thereafter of Ballymoon Castle’s history, but, having little defensive potential, it would appear to have been abandoned and left to fall into its present condition.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi




The scant remains of Lixnaw Court, County Kerry. From the mid-13th to the late 18th century, this was a seat of the FitzMaurices, Barons Kerry. In 1723 the 21st Baron, Thomas FitzMaurice, was created first Earl of Kerry: 30 years earlier, he had married Anne Petty, only daughter of Sir William Petty. The earl was a proud and arrogant man: according to his grandson, the first Earl of Shelburne, he ‘did not want the manners of the country nor the habits of his family to make him a tyrant. He was so by nature. He was the most severe character which can be imagined, obstinate and inflexible…His children did not love him, but dreaded him; his servants the same.’ This provincial plutocrat transformed Lixnaw where, wrote his younger son John FitzMaurice, he spent ‘great sums building and furnishing a very large mansion-house’ along with making many other improvements in the gardens and demesne. However, all his work had started to fall into decay even before the end of the century thanks to the disinterest and extravagance of the third Earl of Kerry. Following the latter’s death in 1818, what remained of the estate was inherited by a cousin, Henry Petty-FitzMaurice, third Marquess of Lansdowne, whose Kerry base was in the south of the county. In consequence, the once splendid house and gardens at Lixnaw were left to moulder, as can be seen in Cornelius Varley’s painting of 1842. Today, a few outer walls survive and, in the surrounding countryside, evidence of the first earl’s great landscaping enterprises, not least a long canal which would once have been a feature of the formal Baroque garden.



A Spouse’s Savings



In October 1981 Christie’s held an auction on its premises in London, offering the studio contents of an Irish artist who had died 40 years earlier and, until this sale, had been largely forgotten. The artist in question was Mildred Anne Butler, born into a gentry family in County Kilkenny in 1858. Following her father’s death in 1881, she trained in London and then travelled elsewhere in Europe to improve her technique, specialising in watercolour. By 1892 she was exhibiting with the Watercolour Society of Ireland and she also showed work at both the Royal Academy in London and the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. Throughout her life, the same subjects recurred: primarily birds, animals such as cattle and garden scenes, usually recorded  from the immediate surroundings of Kilmurry, her family home in County Kilkenny. Here she lived until her death in October 1941 at the age of 83: although one of six children, she survived all her siblings, none of whom had offspring, and so she inherited the property. She bequeathed Kilmurry and its contents to a distant cousin,  Doreen Archer Houblon and it was only a few years after the latter’s death that the contents of Butler’s studio were offered for sale. It was an opportune moment, since this style of work had begun to come back into fashion: Edith Holden’s Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, which came out in 1977, had been a publishing sensation, selling over one million copies in its first year. And the work of another Irish watercolourist and contemporary of Mildred Anne Butler, Rose Barton, was also experiencing a revival in popularity. Ever since then, Kilmurry has been associated with Butler but the story of an earlier owner is just as interesting, if not more so. 





Kilmurry is a house that has been enlarged and altered on many occasions but the core of it, perhaps the section that forms the inner hall, is thought to date back to the 17th century, perhaps around the time that the lands here were granted to Colonel John Bushe. Originally an entrance hall with flanking reception rooms, what is today  the main drawing room appears to have been added around the mid-18th century by the colonel’s grandson, Reverend Thomas Bushe, Rector of Gowran, Prebendary of Inniscarra, and Chaplain of King’s College, Mitchelstown, Co. Cork. According to Richard Lalor Sheil, the Rev. Bushe ‘was in the enjoyment of a lucrative living, and being of an ancient family, which had established itself in Ireland in the reign of Charles the Second, he thought it incumbent upon him to live upon a scale of expenditure more consistent with Irish notions of dignity than English maxims of economy and good sense.’ In other words, he was inclined to allow expenditure to exceed income and in consequence fell badly into debt. In 1767 the Rev. Bushe and his wife Catherine had a son, Charles Kendal Bushe, whose middle name arose from the following circumstances. One night an elderly man called Kendal, who lived not far away on what is now the Mount Juliet estate, sought refuge at Kilmurry, having been attacked and robbed by highwaymen. So grateful was Mr Kendal for the assistance provided by the Bushes that, when he died, he left all his property to the family, on condition that the eldest son should bear his name. It will not come as a surprise that the Rev Bushe, owing to his impecunious state, subsequently sold this unexpected inheritance. Meanwhile his son Charles Kendal, became an extremely successful lawyer: in due course he would act as Solicitor-General for Ireland (1805-1822) and then Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench for Ireland (1822-1841). Unfortunately, as a young man he had signed some papers presented to him by his father without knowing what they contained: at the age of 21, he discovered that he was saddled with some £30,000 worth of parental debts. Kilmurry, which he adored, had to be sold and he left Ireland to avoid creditors. Meanwhile, the feckless Rev Bushe retired to his living in Mitchelstown. 





In December 1793 Charles Kendal Bushe married Anne Crampton and thanks to her dowry – and a loan from a friend – he was able to pay off his most pressing creditors and return to Ireland where his career flourished. Nevertheless, he was never rich and so, in 1814 when Kilmurry was once more offered for sale, he lacked the necessary funds to repurchase his old family home. That is, until his wife told him that she had saved all the money he had given her over the years to buy jewellery and other items: the sum was sufficient to cover the purchase price, and the Bushes now moved back to Kilmurry. It is likely that soon after this further alterations were made to the property. The  west-facing, five-bay building, its limestone parapet lined with urns, which had been added by the Rev Bushe was now flanked by single-storey wings with tripartite windows and dies surmounted by sphinxes. A new, severely neo-classical entrance was created on the north front with Doric pilasters and half-columns. Immediately inside is the hall, with the library to the right and the dining room to the right. Continuing through the house, the next space is a substantial inner hall (as mentioned, likely to be the oldest part of the building) with the drawing room to the right and staircase hall to the left, the latter leading to what were formerly service quarters. To the rear lies an orangery (once Mildred Anne Butler’s studio) which looks over the two-acre walled garden. Despite his passion for the place, after Charles Kendal Bushe died in 1843 his children sold Kilmurry, the new owner being Captain Henry Butler, father of Mildred Anne Butler and himself a talented artist. Creativity ran in the family, because the dining room in Kilmurry contains an extraordinary chimneypiece, elaborately carved by another of the captain’s daughters, Isabel Butler, together with a local carpenter. Unfortunately, following the death of Doreen Archer Houblon, all the contents of the house were sold, not just Mildred Anne Butler’s studio, but the furniture and some 5,000 books in the library. Kilmurry then went into a period of serious decline before being bought and wonderfully restored by the present owners. More recently they have placed the property on the market: perhaps the house awaits another Anne Kendal Bushe with her secret stash of funds…


Going Nowhere



The Glandore Gate, which once marked the main entrance to the Ardfert Abbey estate in County Kerry. Of limestone ashlar and flanked by battlemented walls, with a two-bay single-storey flat-roofed Gothic Revival style gate lodge to one side, the gate was constructed c.1815 for John Crosbie, second (and last) Earl of Glandore, whose coat of arms, topped with a peer’s coronet, can be seen above the arched entrance. Originally on a site further south, the gates were moved to their present position in 1880 by then-owner of the estate, William Talbot-Crosbie. The present gates evidently date from that period, since that on the left features the Talbot-Crosbie crest and motto  (Indignante invidia florebit Justus – Despising envy, the just shall flourish), while that on the right has the crest and motto of the Talbots, Earls of Shrewsbury (Prest d’Accomplir – Ready to accomplish). Ardfert Abbey was gutted by fire in August 1922 during the Civil War, and the ruins subsequently demolished, so that today the gates lead nowhere, while the adjacent lodge has been converted into a private dwelling. 


Next Tuesday, 7th February at 6pm, I shall be speaking about the destruction of Ardfert Abbey, among a number of other houses, during a talk Left without a Handkerchief: Stories of Country House Loss, which may be attended live or watched online. For further information about this event, please see: IGS Lecture: Left Without a Handkerchief: Stories of Country House Loss | Irish Georgian Society