Monthly Archives: March 2024

Evolving Over Time



At the start of the 18th century, Peter Aylward, who came from Aylwardstown at the southern boundaries of County Kilkenny, married Elizabeth Butler. Her father, Sir Richard Butler, owned property at Paulstown further north in the county and the young couple settled here in an old tower house which they then modernised and extended. The new range had a recessed centre with projecting bays on either side, one of which was the original tower house.  This building appears to have survived unchanged for a century until some date in the 1820s/30s when a further single bay extension was added and the whole exterior crenellated, so that the house was thereafter called Shankill Castle; this work has been attributed to local architect William Robertson. In 1861, a conservatory designed by Sir Joseph Paxton and opening off the drawing room was added, but then taken down 100 years later. What does survive is another conservatory on stilts at the back of the building, accessed from a return on the main staircase. Shankill Castle remained home to Peter Aylward’s descendants until 1991 when it was sold; the property has since been owned by historian Geoffrey Cope and his artist wife Elizabeth.


A Piece of Stage Scenery


Around 1783 Peter Daly, then a young man of 20, left home to seek his fortune. Daly was a younger son whose father, Darby Daly, had died some years earlier leaving the family property, Dalysgrove to his eldest-born, Francis. The Dalys could trace their ancestry in this part of the country back to Dermot O’Daly of Killimor, whose five sons were the forebears of many prominent East Galway landowners thereafter, not least the Dalys of Dunsandle (see Dun and Dusted « The Irish Aesthete). Unlike their cousins, however, the Dalys of Dalysgrove remained Roman Catholic while managing to hold onto their estate. In adulthood, Peter Daly might have followed the example of other young adventurers and moved to France, or Austria or Italy, or even North America, then just achieving independence. Instead, he travelled to Jamaica where he became the owner of several coffee plantations, the crops of which were exported to England. In 1806, he married Bridget Louisa MacEvoy, daughter of Christopher MacEvoy, another substantial plantation owner in the West Indies; the couple would have three sons. Interestingly, Peter Daly named his Jamaican estate Daly’s Grove, after the family property back in Ireland. Eventually, in the late 1820s, he had made sufficient money in the Caribbean that he was able to buy the original Dalysgrove in County Galway from his elder brother Francis. By this time, he had also acquired another property in the same part of the world, Corbally, which had previously been owned by a branch of the Blake family.





The Blakes were one of the Tribes of Galway, the 14 families who dominated trade in that city during the MIddle Ages. Like many of the other Tribes, they began to buy land in the surrounding counties and according to an account of the family records published in 1905, Peter Blake, third son of Sir Richard Blake of Ardfry, County Galway (for more on this house, see All Washed Up « The Irish Aesthete), was in December 1679 granted the castle and lands of Corbally by patent. His descendants remained living there until 1829 when the property was sold to Peter Daly. (Incidentally, Sir Henry Blake, the 19th century British colonial administrator who was successively Governor of the Bahamas, Newfoundland, Jamaica, Hong Kong and Ceylon – now Sri Lanka – was the grandson of Peter Blake who sold the estate to Daly). Occupying a prominent site on high ground, Corbally began as a late-mediaeval tower house but c.1780 the Blakes built a large classical house in front of this. An old photograph shows that the building’s facade was of three storeys over basement and of seven bays, the centre bay in a pedimented breakfront with a typical tripartite doorcase on the groundfloor approached by a short flight of stone steps and an oculus within the pediment. Directly below this, and between the two third-floor windows was a large panel displaying a coat of arms. Following Peter Daly’s acquisition of the property, the house’s name was changed to Castle Daly and significant changes were made to the garden front, where the old tower house was given a twin to create a pair of projecting wings with a forecourt between them. The roofline of both towers was ornamented with limestone crenellations supported on corbels. While these helped to convey an impression of antiquity, the two bays between them retained the 18th century Venetian tripartite doorcase with a Diocletian window directly above, although the roofline was again given crenellations. Similar work was carried out at Dalysgrove after it too had been acquired by Peter Daly. 





As mentioned, thanks to the fortune he had made in Jamaica, Peter Daly was able to buy both the Corbally (thereafter Castle Daly) and Dalysgrove estates, and return to live in Ireland where he carried out significant alterations to both properties. It helped that in November 1835, he was awarded £2,318, 11 shillings and six pence by the British government. Why so? Because this sum was compensation for the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean colonies. Peter Daly had hitherto had 113 slaves working for him on his Jamaican plantation and, following the Slave Abolition Act which came into effect in 1834, owners were entitled to seek recompense from the government for loss of revenue. Daly was among 170 people in Ireland who so benefitted under the terms of the act (for more on this, see Dirty Money « The Irish Aesthete). Peter Daly had two sons who survived to adulthood, and following his death in 1846 the elder, James, inherited Castle Daly while the younger, Peter Paul was left Dalysgrove; curiously both men died in the same year, 1881. While the Castle Daly estate ran to 3,495 acres of land, that at Dalysgrove had just 500. However, by 1906, presumably following sales under the terms of the various Land Acts, Castle Daly was surrounded by just 100 acres of untenanted demesne. The last of the family to own this property was Dermot Joseph Daly who in July 1945 sold Castle Daly. Two months later, an advertisement announced that various items removed from the house – shutters, windows, chimneypieces, wooden flooring, staircases – were being offered for sale in convenient lots. The house built by the Blakes was later demolished but for unknown reasons the garden front, as composed by Peter Daly, was left standing, a strange spectacle on the horizon looking, as Mark Bence-Jones noted, ‘like a folly, or a piece of stage scenery.’ Down in the village below and in a prominent position in front of St Teresa’s Catholic church (and formerly facing the entrance gates to the estate) can be seen the Daly Mausoleum which dates from 1860. 

The Start of a Convoy




Herewith the former entrance to Convoy, County Donegal, a plain classical house built for a branch of the Montgomery family. This whimsical gateway is described by Alistair Rowan as ‘a nice piece of castle-style nonsense in the manner of Francis Johnston.’ The architect responsible is unknown (J.A.K. Dean suggests it might be attributed to the amateur architect Sir Thomas Forster), nor is the date of its construction clear, although most likely around the same time as the present main house was built, c.1806. Of rubble stone, the composition involves a carriage gate under castellated parapet and flanked by a pair of round turrets. From these run concave quadrants, with one of them concluding in a square tower with pedestrian entrance on the ground floor. Beyond this is a single-storey cottage, now derelict, with arched windows, thought to be somewhat later than the adjacent entrance. A keystone over the main gateway carries a coat of arms with the the date 1693 and the monogram RM; the former presumably signifies when the Montgomerys first settled here and the latter are the initials of Robert Montgomery who lived at Convoy in the early 19th century and therefore commissioned this structure. Incidentally, a genealogical history of the family published in the United States in 1863 claims that General Richard Montgomery, killed during the American War of Independence while leading the unsuccessful attack on Quebec in December 1775, had been born in the house at Convoy.



Quaint and Old-Fashioned


‘Whoever has travelled by the coast road in County Antrim which connects the towns of Larne and Ballycastle, may have observed at the distance of five miles from Larne, after passing one of the boldest promontories on the entire coast, a castellated edifice, standing immediately on the roadside at the head of a beautiful and romantic bay. Nor can anyone with a taste for the picturesque have seen it – backed by an amphitheatre of mountains and fronted by the Irish Channel coast – without bestowing upon it at least a passing admiration…This castle was for many years the hospitable residence of the Shaws of Ballygally, who came originally from Greenock, in Scotland, where, from very early times, their ancestors occupied a very high position in Renfrewshire. The first of the Shaws, who came to Ireland in the beginning of the seventeenth century, was one of the Scottish settlers who were located in Ireland by King James I. In the Irish wars of 1641, the castle of Ballygally, garrisoned by its own tenantry, afforded shelter to the Protestants of the district, and in the Revolutionary wars of 1688-90, the name of Lieutenant-Colonel Show is often honourably mentioned.’
From The Architect, March 1st 1879.





James Shaw is thought to have been born around 1594, the son of Scotsman John Shaw who settled in Ireland with his family in the early 17th century and duly received a grant of land from the Earl of Antrim. One grant was made on 1st February, 1634, to ‘John Shaw, the elder, of Ballygellie, in the county of Antrim, gentleman,’ of ‘all that eighteen score acres of land in Ballygellie, aforesaid, Tarnemoney, Nogher, Carncaslen, and Corcermain’ to hold forever in fee farm, at the yearly rent of £24.  James Shaw subsequently married Isabel Brisbane, also of Scottish birth, and the couple were responsible for constructing a castle which in style very much reflects their country of origin. In form, the building is a four-storey rectangular tower with a steep gable-ended roof and at each corner cone-topped bartizans supported by corbels and flanked by little dormer windows. The castle was formerly surrounded by a bawn wall, necessary given the time and place in which it was built. Early photographs do not show the small circular turrets at the corners of the grounds, so these must be a late-19th century addition to the site. Inside, above the stone door giving access to a spiral staircase can be seen inscribed ‘GODIS PROVIDENS IS MY INHERITANS’ and the date 1625, and over this a coat of arms with the initials JS and IB, standing for James Shaw and Isabel Brisbane. This used to be on the exterior of the castle but was moved to its present location around 1760 when alterations were made to the building, some of which – such as a panelled room on the first floor and sash windows – still remain.





Thought to be the oldest continually-inhabited building in Northern Ireland, Ballygally Castle remained occupied by successive generations of the Shaw family until the early 19th century. Unfortunately a litigation over ownership of the property in the 1780s left them heavily indebted and in 1820 some 450 acres around the castle had to be sold. Thereafter it appears to have been rented to a variety of tenants. In 1834, for example, it was reported as being ‘the dwelling of the chief officer of the coastguard for the prevention of smuggling, from which it would appear that it has been subject to a complete reversal of destiny, having been supposed at one time to have been a stronghold for smuggling.’ Four decades later, the Presbyterian minister and historian Classon Porter was living there and described the castle as ‘quaint and old-fashioned but that I like, and it is very warm and comfortable, the walls being 5 or 6 feet thick so that we never feel the greatest storm that blows.’ After the First World War, Colonel William Agnew Moore, whose great-grandmother had been a Shaw, came to live in the castle, the last member of the family to do so. Within a few years, he had put the building up for sale and in 1936 it was bought by the Earl of Antrim (whose ancestor had first granted the land on which it stood to John Shaw). A local newspaper reported that the earl ‘is busy at present converting this ancient mansion into a modern hotel’ which duly opened in 1938. It was sold again in the early 1950s, this time to entrepreneur Cyril Lord (who had a carpet factory in neighbouring County Down). He refurbished and extended the property before it changed hands once more. Today Ballygally Castle continues to operate as an hotel, the late Charles Brett deeming additions to the north to be ‘unobjectionable.’ while ‘more lurid, Disneylike proposals were fortunately disallowed in 1984.’ 

 

Offering Harbour Views



There appears to be little information about the origins or history of Harbourhill Lodge which, as its name implies, overlooks the little harbour at Newquay, County Clare. Of three bays and two storeys over raised basement, this is one of a number of such properties constructed along the coast in the late 18th/early 19th centuries as occasional homes for landowners whose main estates were elsewhere. It appears on the first Ordnance Survey map (published 1842) and was subsequently listed as being let to the Rev Michael J O’Fea by John Bindon Scott, whose family owned the Cahercon estate at the other end of the county. Ruined in the aftermath of the Great Famine, the Scotts sold up and left Ireland, and it is known that at the beginning of the last century Harbourhill Lodge had become a barracks for the Royal Irish Constabulary. Presumably dereliction began after the War of Independence, and now a hollow shell stands overlooking the harbour at Newquay.


Then and Now

 

In the middle of the 16th century, one Hans Fock moved from the north German city of Lübeck to Estonia, which was then coming under the control of Sweden. Around 100 years later, Queen Christina, shortly before her abdication, elevated Fock’s descendants to the Swedish peerage. After Sweden’s decisive defeat by Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 and the subsequent annexation of Estonia to Russian rule, Henrik Johann Fock moved first to Malmö and then to other parts of Sweden, where through marriage he came into possession of an estate. His heir, Jacob Constantin Fock acquired further property, including land at Råbäck in the county of Skaraborg; it is from this place that the family’s title, Baron de Robeck, derives. His son, Johan Henrik Fock, enjoyed a colourful career, including fighting against the British army during the American War of Independence, before moving to England where in March 1789 he married Anne Fitz-Patrick, heiress to a Galway landowner: four months after the wedding, by an Act of Parliament Fock was naturalised as a British subject under the name ‘John Henry Fock, called Baron de Robeck.’ The couple’s son, John Michael Henry Fock, after serving under General Sir John Moore in the Peninsula Wars, settled in Ireland where in 1820 he married the Hon Margaret Lawless, daughter of Valentine Lawless, second Baron Cloncurry. Famously, her parents had divorced after Lord Cloncurry had successfully sued Sir John Bennett Piers for criminal conversation with his wife. Alas, it proved to be a case of ‘like mother, like daughter’ and in 1828 the de Robecks were divorced after the baroness was found to be having an affair with Lord Sussex Lennox, a younger son of the fourth Duke of Richmond (the couple subsequently went on to marry and have three children). Baron de Robeck married a second time and in due course acquired a house in Dublin’s Merrion Square which at some date in the early 1850s he elaborately redecorated. 






Like its neighbours, 40 Merrion Square dates from the late 18th century and has a three-bay plain brick facade. Its interior was presumably decorated in similar style to those on either side, with neoclassical plasterwork and white marble chimneypieces. However, as mentioned already, the house underwent something of a transformation in the mid-19th century when occupied by the third Baron de Robeck. Here the two first-floor reception rooms were redecorated in elaborate Louis Quinze style, the walls covered with thin panels filled with pendants, urns, leaves, ribbons and musical instruments. Some of the panels were also filled with mirrored glass while pedimented roundels were inserted over the doors and, in the rear room, the central oval of the ceiling painted with a trompe-l’œil sky. The architect responsible for this scheme is unknown, although Christine Casey has suggested the Belfast firm of Lanyon, Lynn & Lanyon since soon afterwards it was commissioned by the fourth baron to design a new country house, Gowran Grange in County Kildare. He may have been inspired to do so by the unfortunate death of his father, the man who had undertaken the refurbishment of 40 Merrion Square. Aside from his residence in Dublin, the third baron also rented Leixlip Castle a few miles outside the city. While staying there in October 1856, he disappeared, his body only being found 11 days later; it would appear the baron, who had gone down to the edge of the river Liffey below the castle to see the Salmon Leap, had slipped and drowned. 






In the period after the third baron’s death, 40 Merrion Square served various purposes. During the First World War, it housed the Irish War Hospital Supply Depot, and at the time of the Easter Rising in 1916, it was transformed by Dr Ella Webb into an emergency field hospital capable of treating 50 patients. Later in the last century, the house’s neighbour, 39 Merrion Square, became the British Embassy until burned by rioters in the aftermath of Derry’s Bloody Sunday in January 1972. By that date, the state-owned Electricity Supply Board already owned 40-43 Merrion Square and the same body subsequently acquired and restored No.39. Various alterations were made to the buildings, not least openings made at different levels, allowing internal movement from one house to the next. A lift shaft was inserted to the rear of No.41 and the party walls between rear gardens largely demolished, with much of the ground covered in frankly prosaic buildings and sub-stations. In 2019 the ESB offered the quintet for sale as a single lot, bought two years later by a development company which has since undertaken a scrupulous restoration of the whole property, so that it now provides flexible workspaces for a variety of businesses. Today’s pictures show the first floor rooms of 40 Merrion Square before and after this recent refurbishment. 

Commodious and Comfortable



‘As soon as I got hither, I ran to my building, and had the pleasure to find every thing very well…The Scaffolding is all down, and the House almost pointed, and It’s figure is vastly more beautiful than I expected it would be. Conceited people may censure its plainness. But I don’t wish it any further ornament than it has. As far as I can judge, the inside will be very commodious, and comfortable. Were it finish’d and season’d, I could wish you here this minute. But I hope we may yet pass some pleasant days together in it.’ Edward Synge, Bishop of Elphin, writing to his daughter Alicia in May 1747 about the new episcopal palace he was then building in Elphin, County Roscommon. Believed to have been designed by Dublin architect Michael Wills, the house was a typical example of Irish Palladianism, with a three-storey, three-bay block flanked by quadrants leading to two-storey wings. The main building survived until 1911 when destroyed by fire and was subsequently demolished, leaving a gap in the centre of the composition. Today the north wing stands a ruin behind a bungalow while the south wing has been restored as a residence. To the left of this are the remains of a Gothick gatelodge and its former gates, presumably the original entrance to the property. 


Unhappy Statistics


For many visitors to Ireland, spending time in a local pub – sampling whatever is on offer, engaging in conversation with local residents, perhaps listening to live musicians – is a memorable experience. As indeed it is, and long has been, for the same local residents. However, in many instances, that experience is no longer available. Figures released last year show that an average 152 pubs have closed annually since 2019 and that the number of such licensed premises has declined by 22.5 per cent since 2005. A survey published in August 2022 showed that counties suffering the highest percentage reduction in the number of pubs since 2005 were Laois (30.6%), Offaly (29.9%), Limerick (29.1%), Roscommon (28.3%) and Cork (28.5%). County Meath suffered the least reduction, with just three pubs closing their doors during this period. But the trend is nationwide, as can be testified by anyone who travels around Ireland; wherever you go, there are shuttered premises falling into dereliction, another aspect of Ireland’s heritage slowly disappearing. 




It is easy, too easy, to wax sentimental over the Irish pub and its supposed charms. Certainly some of them are places of great character, well-designed, well-maintained, well-run and a pleasure to visit. A number of them, especially those in the larger cities and towns, are repositories of 19th century craftsmanship, marvels of mahogany, brass and glass. These are the premises that deservedly feature in advertisements and tourist promotions. But there are plenty of other pubs in Ireland devoid of any aesthetic merit, with worn linoleum on the floor, tatty plastic seating and facilities that might most politely be described as grubby. However, whether objects of beauty or not, they all serve the same purpose: providing a venue where people can assemble and enjoy each other’s company. Remove such places, especially in non-urban areas, and you remove the opportunity for those people to meet, thereby increasing the likelihood of isolation. Last June, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre published a report proposing that Ireland has the highest levels of loneliness in Europe. 




Many explanations have been given for the decline in pubs around Ireland, not least the imposition of stricter legislation around driving and alcohol consumption. While the merits of these measures cannot be questioned, they have coincided with a liberalisation of licensing laws, so that it is now possible to buy alcohol in a much greater number of premises (including petrol stations). The onset of Covid-19 and the obligation of residents to remain in their own properties also encouraged greater consumption of alcohol at home rather than in a public setting, and this is thought to have led to a widespread change in drinking habits. Increased operating costs, not least those of lighting and heating, have also made the business increasingly unviable for many pub owners, particularly those outside large centres of population. Running a business of this kind has grown steadily less attractive or feasible. And so the closures are likely to continue and more premises left to fall into ruin. As if Ireland didn’t already have sufficient derelict buildings.

A Gentle Gothick



Lismacue, County Tipperary, a property which has remained in the same family since the land on which it stands was bought by William Baker in 1704 for £923. Standing at the end of an exceptionally long avenue of lime trees planted c.1760, the building acquired its present, mildly Tudorbethan appearance at the start of the 19th century thanks to Kilkenny architect William Robertson. Of three bays and two storeys, the entrance front’s most notable feature is a single-storey limestone Gothick open porch; a lower service wing to the north concludes in a gable with traceried window, which suggests a chapel (but was probably once a kitchen).  The other two sides looking across the gardens are of five bays, that to the rear having two blind bays as the original intention was for the building to be further extended here.