Monthly Archives: April 2025

Behind a Modest Facade


Like many 18th century residential buildings in central Dublin, the facade of Ely House is extremely plain, of red brick with only the pedimented stone fan- and side-lit doorcase offering some interest. Of four storeys-over-basement, the building had been bought in 1770 by Henry Loftus from Dublin physician and property developer Gustavus Hume. The previous year, following the death of his unmarried nephew, the hitherto somewhat impoverished Loftus had inherited a substantial estate and the title Viscount Loftus: the following year he would be created Earl of Ely. Known for his social pretensions, he would be mocked as ‘Count Loftonzo’ in the satirical History of Barataria published in the Freeman’s Journal in Spring 1771. The work he commissioned at Rathfarnham Castle, County Dublin has already been discussed here (see A Whiter Shade of Pale « The Irish Aesthete and Flying High « The Irish Aesthete). Although Loftus already owned a house in the capital on Cavendish Row, following his inheritance evidently he felt the need to cross the river Liffey and occupy a new property, hence the purchase of Ely House. Unusual because of its size, the building was originally of six bays, a seventh being acquired on the left-hand (north) side in the 19th century around the time the house was divided into two properties: today it is near-impossible to photograph the entire exterior of the house without being assaulted by traffic: hence the somewhat truncated image here. When first occupied, the attic floor seemingly contained a private, sixty-seat theatre with space for an orchestra. The Freeman’s Journal of 19th April 1785 reports on the performance of both a tragedy (‘The Distressed Mother’) and a comedy (‘All the World’s a Stage’), both acted by friends of the earl’s second and much-younger wife, Anne Bonfoy. Sadly, nothing of this theatre now survives. But other parts of the remarkable interior remain to be explored. 





The rear of Ely House’s groundfloor is given over to the double-height stair hall, the steps of which are of Portland Stone, while the panelled balustrade is made of wrought iron and carved gilt-wood. At the base can be seen a life-size figure of Hercules, resting from his Labours. The latter are then depicted as one ascends the staircase, although not in the correct narrative order: shown here is the eagle killed with an arrow by the mythical hero. The inspiration for this work is believed to have been a substantially larger staircase in the Palace of Charles of Lorraine in Brussels – now a museum – created by the Flemish sculptor Laurent Delvaux in 1769. The stuccodore Barthelemy Cremillion, who had been employed in Ireland in the second half of the 1750s, was responsible for the Brussels palace plasterwork and is therefore thought to have been behind the similar scheme in Ely House since by this date he had returned to Dublin. On the other hand, Professor Christine Casey has pointed out that the stoneyard of sculptor John van Nost adjoined Lord Ely’s property and that both he and Cremillion had worked at the same time on the decoration of the city’s Lying-in Hospital (otherwise known as the Rotunda Hospital), so he may also have been involved here. 




Many of the reception rooms in Ely House, Dublin, are rather plain, although it retains some splendid chimneypieces again thought to have been the work of John van Nost. One of the ground floor reception rooms features a series of figurative ovals and roundels depicting a variety of scenes and surrounded by pendants and swirls that look like strings of pearls. It used to be judged that this plasterwork was part of the house’s 18th century decoration but more recently the scheme is considered to date from the late 19th/early 20th century when the building was occupied by the wealthy surgeon and collector Sir Thornley Stoker (incidentally, the elder brother of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula): he lived here from 1890 to 1911 and filled the building with his valuable collection of art and furniture, alas all auctioned before his death in 1912. The room directly above certainly suggests a relatively recent vintage, the figures here looking as though they had stepped out of the work of an Edwardian illustrator like Kate Greenaway. Since 1923, Ely House has been owned by the Knights of St Columbanus, an Irish Roman Catholic society which uses the building as its national headquarters. 

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Flawless


Limerick’s former Custom House, today the Hunt Museum, dates from the second half of the 1760s when designed by architect Davis Ducart. His origins were uncertain: in 1768, William Brownlow wrote that he had ‘dropped into this Kingdom from the clouds, no one knows how, or what brought him to it’ although it has been proposed that Ducart – his original name Daviso de Arcort – may have been Sardinian or Piedmontese. Whatever his background, Ducart enjoyed a successful career in Ireland, including the commission to design this custom house. Here is a splendid Venetian window on the northern wall of what is now called the Captain’s Room, seemingly where ships’ captains were received while their vessels were moored on the quay outside. It rises high to a coved ceiling, at the centre of which is a plaster rose. Simple, dignified, flawless.

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A Work in Progress


‘Bremore, 9th June 1783, the castle of Bremore about a mile N.of Balbriggan is situated on a rising ground very near the sea and commands a delightful prospect therof. It seems rather a modern building with good limestone quoins,window frames, munnions etc,the door on the W,side is particularly neat,ornamented on each side with pilaster wch support a suitable pediment in the space of wch are two coat of arms parted and pale Vizt-Ermine, a border engrailed on the sinister side-Barnewall and a fess between 5 martins 3 and 2, on the dexter side.The lower part of this case. is very strong and arched in a very irregular manner and the whole appears to me to have been not many years ago inhabited. Besides a number of garden walls and such like inclosures, still to be traced, are the walls of a Chapel in which is nothing remarkable…..‘
Antiquary Austin Cooper, 1783






Located some twenty miles north of Dublin and overlooking the Irish Sea, Bremore is supposed to have been the location of a monastic settlement founded by St Molaga, a Welshman traditionally said to have introduced bee-keeping into Ireland. The ruins of a late-medieval church called St Molaga’s are located to the immediate south of Bremore Castle for which it served as a manorial chapel. As for the castle, or at least the lands on which it now stands, the earliest reference appears to date from c.1300 when one Willam Rosel de Brimor is referred to in the Calendar of Documents Relating to Ireland. More definitely, in 1316 Wolfran de Barnewall married Nichola, daughter of Robert de Clahull, and through this alliance acquired large tracts of land in north county Dublin. The Barnewalls have been mentioned here before (see Fallen Out of Use « The Irish Aesthete. Incidentally, the 21st and last Baron Trimlestown died last year). Wolfran and his descendants were a cadet branch of this family. By the time of his son Reginald’s death some time before 1395, the Barnewalls were being described as lords of Bremore, Balrothery and Balbriggan, although their main residence was Drimnagh Castle, situated a couple of miles west of central Dublin.
In an inquisition of 1567 the estate at Bremore is stated to have consisted of ‘a castle, 8 messuages or buildings, a dovecote, 8 gardens and 132 acres’ and to have been held by Edward Barnewall of Drimnagh, ‘as of his manor of Balrothery.’ This is the earliest reference to a castle being located here.  A mid-16th century limestone mantel, now housed in St Macculin’s church but thought to have originally been made for the castle, celebrates the marriage of Edward Barnewall’s son James to Margaret St Lawrence, whose family lived at Howth Castle. The Barnewalls remained Roman Catholic during the Confederate Wars of the 1640s and in the Civil Survey carried out during the following decade, the property of Matthew Barnewall, ‘Irish Papist’, was described as containing ‘one burnt castle with a great barne and eight tenements, one orchard & parke with some young ash trees.’ His son James regained the estate in 1663 and presumably refurbished the building. However, he – or perhaps his son – had no male heirs, only a daughter Eleanor, who married Walter Bagenal in 1706. The link with the Barnewalls then ended as Bremore and its surrounding lands were sold for £7,000 to Henry Petty, Earl of Shelburne, from whom the property passed to the Petty-Fitzmaurices, Marquesses of Lansdowne. 






No longer occupied by its owners but instead let to tenants, Bremore Castle gradually fell into decay. Austin Cooper’s report of the building has already been cited. In 1837 Samuel Lewis noted ‘the ruins of Bremore castle, the ancient seat of a branch of the Barnewall family, consisting of some of the out-buildings and part of a chapel, with a burial ground, which is still used by some of the inhabitants’. John D’Alton in 1844 referred to ‘the ancient castle, of which traces are yet discernible’ and commanging ‘that sublime and extensive prospect over land and sea.’ By this time the castle was occupied by a tenant called John King and his descendants remained there until 1926, although Bremore Castle and its surrounding lands had been sold by the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne to the Land Commission in 1904. Another family acquired the building and remained there until finally the old building came into the possession of Dublin County Council in 1984. A decade later, following the break-up of that authority, the newly-created Fingal County Council became responsible for Bremore Castle. Since then, a programme of reconstruction, incorporating the opportunity to train stonemasons and other craftsmen and using traditional materials and methods, has been proceeding on the site. At the time of its initial construction in the 15th/16th century, Bremore Castle consisted of a rectangular hall-house with eastern flanking tower, a two storey extension being introduced on the north-western facade in the late 16th – early 17th century. Not a lot of this survived into the late 20th century. Today it has been rebuilt to an idealised version of a fortified house based on a sketch of the western view of the castle made by Austin Cooper in 1783, with a number of conjectural embellishments to both exterior and interior, the latter’s chimneypieces, doors and window openings in large measure being new additions inspired by examples of fortified houses from the 15th to 17th centuries surviving elsewhere in the country. It has been a long-running project and one that has yet to be finished. 


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Yes, Vicar



Located opposite St Patrick’s Cathedral, Vicars’ Hill in Armagh owes its origins to Primate Hugh Boulter who in 1724 commissioned the construction of four houses here (now Nos. 1-4) to provide accommodation for clergymen’s widows, endowing this with a fund worth £50 per annum. These buildings are easily identified by their  handsome Gibbsian limestone doorcases. The rest of the terrace dates from half a century later when Primate Richard Robinson, as one of his projects within the city, commissioned a further seven houses, one of which (No.5) initially served as the Diocesan Registry Office but is now a museum while another of the buildings was erected as a Music Hall where boys who sang in the cathedral choir would train and sleep in rooms above.


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Beyond Balief


The histories of some Irish buildings are easier to trace than others. The origins and owners of Balief Castle, County Kilkenny prove particularly elusive. It is commonly stated that the castle, actually another late-medieval tower house, was constructed by a member of the Shortall family. The Shortalls were of Norman origin, and settled in this part of the country in the late 13th century: a townland is still called Shortallstown. The Shortalls allied themselves with another, more powerful, dynasty, the Graces, Barons of Courtstown, and this helped to assure the possession of their lands. Both the Graces and the Shortalls remained loyal to the Roman Catholic faith and to the Stuart cause. In 1689, the then Baron of Courtstown raised and equipped a regiment of foot at his own expense to support James II during the Williamite Wars, and Thomas Shortall joined this force. When the baron died the following year, his son Robert Grace succeeded as head of the regiment but he was badly wounded at the Battle of Aughrim in July 1691 and died the following year. Nevertheless, the regiment continued to operate, with Captain Thomas Shortall commanding a company of 100 men at the second Siege of Limerick. Following the treaty concluded there in October 1691, Shortall like many others left Ireland and joined the French army. He is said to have continued to serve until the age of 88, and to have died in 1762 at the age of 104.




What happened to Balief Castle in the aftermath of the Williamite Wars is something of a mystery, but it appears to have passed into the hands of the St George family, which owned large estates in County Kilkenny. In Atkinson’s The Irish Tourist (1816) Balief Castle is described as being ‘the seat of Mr St. George’, presumably Robert St George whose father Sir Richard St George lived not far away at the since-demolished house of Woodsgift. However, it would seem there was another, more modern residence here, again no longer standing, since the earliest Ordnance Survey map shows ‘Balief House’ on or adjacent to the same site of the castle. Hercules Langrishe St George is later listed as owning the property, and being a local Justice of the Peace before Balief became occupied in the 1860s by Denis W Kavanagh, another gentleman whose family owned land in the area. Thereafter it is hard to find any more information about the place. 




Most Irish tower houses are either square or rectangular. Circular examples are relatively rare, although one has featured here in the past, Moorstown Castle, County Tipperary (see In the Round « The Irish Aesthete). Thought to date from the 16th century, Balief Castle is another member of this small group. The building castle rises approximately 35 feet and has an interior diameter of the castle of 15 feet, eight inches with walls some eight feet, four inches thick. As is customary, it has a single entrance, a pointed arch door on the west side. Immediately inside, is the staircase, with an ascent to the top by 50 stone steps, the majority of which are eight inches thick (the final nine being six and a half inches thick), but all floors and other internal divisions have long been lost, leaving one space that climbs to a still intact domed roof. Today Balief Castle stands in the middle of a field, little noticed and little known. 


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Astonished at the Splendour


The former House of Lords in what is now the Bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin was discussed here some time ago (see Where Turkeys Voted for Christmas « The Irish Aesthete). As is well known, after the building ceased to be used as the Irish Houses of Parliament and had been purchased by the bank, Francis Johnston was invited to make alterations, including the creation of a central Cash Office behind Edward Lovett Pearce’s south front. This five bay, double-height space rises to a richly decorated coved ceiling, the centre of which supports a clerestory concluding in a coffered ceiling. When George IV visited the bank during his visit to Ireland, he was reportedly ‘astonished at the splendour’ of the hall.

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On the Hill of the Fairies


In 1897 Edith Leeson Marshall married Sir Home Gordon, 12th (and last) baronet of Embo. A passionate cricketer, Sir Home wrote extensively on the sport although he never seems to have been an outstanding player. His wife Edith, descended from the first Earl of Milltown, was the youngest child of Richard and Rebecca Leeson Marshall, an evangelical Christian couple. Her father had inherited from his uncle an estate in County Kerry called Callinafercy and there built a comfortable, unpretentious villa for his family, the place later described by his daughter as ‘a house without a redeeming feature.’ But he died when Edith was only aged seven and her widowed mother moved about mainland Europe before settling in Richmond, outside London. In her entertaining memoir, The Winds of Time (1934), Edith Gordon describes how, at the time of her marriage both she and her new husband were convinced he could look forward to a future as a successful novelist, ‘but when, after some months of strenuous effort in the literary and journalistic worlds, he had only succeeded in obtaining the editorship of Banjo World at three guineas a month, my confidence began to wane…’ Meanwhile, Lady Gordon began to write, albeit under a pseudonym, for various publications including Ladies’ Field, then edited by the notorious Lady Colin Campbell. When she published a collection of essays under her own name in 1908, this was ‘received with astonishment by certain of my friends and acquaintances. “How clever of you to be able to write,” they exclaimed in terms of surprise mingled with awe.’ Through her writing, Lady Gordon also came to know Edward Hudson, founder of Country Life, and often accompanied him on expeditions, thereby getting to visit many country houses and meeting the likes of Edwin Lutyens, Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson, with whom she shared an Irish background. All of these individuals would influence her when she came to commission a house for herself in County Kerry. What inspired her to embark on such an enterprise? Lady Gordon explained that by 1913, she had grown tired of life in London and its seemingly endless society crazes. ‘I felt I must get away from everybody and everything if I were not to become like the lady in the Divorce Court who, on being reprimanded by the judge for the frequency with which she committed adultery, flippantly remarked, “Well, what else can you do between tea and dinner”?’ And so, having inherited some money, she bought a parcel of land in County Kerry.





A rare example of an Arts and Crafts house in Ireland, Ard na Sidhe (meaning ‘Hill of the Fairies’) sits above Caragh Lake to the immediate west and ‘surrounded by mountains varying in colour from deepest purple to distant misty blue.’ Initially a wooden house was constructed on the site, but this proved problematic. In The Winds of Time, Lady Gordon claimed ‘I may as well remark that, having designed all the important parts of the house myself, such as the drawing room and the veranda, the bay-windows and my own bedroom, I had left such uninteresting details as the chimneys and stairs to the contractor.’ The latter individual she then blamed for such problems as the entrance hall being in the wrong place, claiming that when this was pointed out to him, ‘he drew himself up, and with an ingratiating smile, remarked that in view of the great success of the rest of the house I must forgive him. “It is really the nicest little house I ever built,’ he added with pride, “and the first in which I’ve been able to carry out all my own ideas”.’ In due course and inevitably, the wooden building had to be replaced with something more substantial, this one designed by the English-born Percy Richard Morley Horder, who in 1915 exhibited a drawing for the house at the Royal Academy in London. Although little remembered today, Horder enjoyed a successful career during his lifetime (he died in 1944). His early work tended to be in the Arts and Crafts style, while in the interwar period he became known for his Neo-Georgian work. He designed, or remodelled, a large number of country houses in England as well as churches (he was the son of a Congregationalist minister), university buildings in Cambridge and Oxford, as well as a large part of the Nottingham University’s campus. When young, Horder was good looking and could have charm, but he also had a ferocious temper, hence his nickname of ‘Holy Murder.’ His elder daughter thought that ‘he was the most remarkable man I have ever met, the most dedicated, the most charming (when he chose to be) and the most awful.’ Meanwhile, in an account of his life by Clyde Binfield published in 1988, it was recalled that Horder had a habit of treating his clients with disdain. ‘It was how most professionals might sometimes wish to treat their clients, if they dared. Horder’s way became legendary. He would shout at them, his voice sounding through the floor. “You come here and hector and bully me”, he shouted as one client retreated quietly from the room.’ Nevertheless, he seems to have enjoyed a good relationship with Lady Gordon who admitted that she had chosen him ‘out of a number of competitors, chiefly for his romantic appearance, which I felt somehow would be reflected in his designs and work. She also acknowledged not being the easiest of clients and given to regular changes of mind: ‘No architect, I am sure, ever had so much to contend with, and none ever emerged more amiably out of the ordeal, not even uttering a protest when submitting a drawing which, I saw one day, to my horror, was numbered “103”.’ Incidentally, the original wooden house was taken down and re-erected at the nearby town of Killorglin where it served as a Sinn Fein club until burnt out by the Black and Tans. 





Although reminiscent in design of an English manor house, Ard na Sidhe is built of local materials including sandstone from Glenbeigh, the only exception being Westmorland roof slates. Its exterior composed of a series of steep gables and mullioned windows, the building is surrounded by a sequence of gardens originally laid out by Lady Gordon, surrounded by low stone walls, all meandering down to the lake shoreline. Again, in her memoir, she lays claim for having been responsible for the gardens’ design, after an unnamed ‘lady gardener’, employed to help with laying out the site, revealed ‘that she knew even less about it than I did.’ Lady Gordon battled on alone but much enjoying the experience: ‘I must candidly say that I did not feel in the least that my garden was a “school of peace.” On the contrary, I should describe it as a perennial nightmare…on the other hand, my garden never bored me. It worried me by day, and kept me awake by night; it made me swear and it made me weep; and it would have taken very little more to make me scream.’ Unlike other houses in this part of the country, Ard na Sidhe survived both the War of Independence and the Civil War, although raided on at least seven occasions by troops belonging to various factions, and having items – including a motor car – stolen. But in the aftermath, separated (and eventually divorced) from her husband and with a diminished income, Lady Gordon found herself obliged to sell the property. ‘Parting with it,’ she wrote, ‘took an ever-increasing financial strain off my mind, but it left a hole in my heart which has never been filled…’ The house then passed through a number of hands before being acquired by the family of its present owners who in 1960 opened the place as a small hotel. More recently, Ard na Sidhe benefitted from a superlative restoration by architectural firm Howley Hayes Cooley, during which the original steel framed leaded casement windows were repaired and the stone exterior repointed in lime, while the interior underwent a replanning of the public areas and bedrooms. Many features which had been lost over intervening decades and, just as importantly, Ard na Sidhe’s original character, were brought back, along with panelled walls, stone chimneypieces, oak and stone flooring and oak doors. Today Ard na Sidhe looks and feels as though its original chatelaine still lived on the premises. 


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Kenure Park



After Monday’s post about the melancholy fate of Kenure Park, County Dublin, here are the other remains of the estate: two gate lodges. The first of these, close to the centre of Rush town and erected around the mid-19th century, stands inside curved quadrant walls of wrought iron concluding in granite piers with vermiculated bands and concluding in spherical finials, this work. believed to date from c1740. The lodge itself, of single storey and three bays with a pedimented central breakfront, appears to be currently unused and suffers from having the render stripped from its exterior. The second lodge, which lies to the north of the now-demolished house, is again of single storey and three bays with a central pedimented breakfront. Thought to date from c.1830, the building retains its render which features boldly vermiculated quoins. In this case, however, the gate piers are in a much poorer state of repair.

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