While several hundred Irish country houses were destroyed during the years of the War of Independence and Civil War, many more were subsequently lost over the following decades as owners found it impossible to maintain them in the face of rising prices and falling income. The late 1940s and 1950s were a particularly bad period for these properties. As early as 1932, the Irish Times had noted that ‘the dead hand of the state lies heavily on the great houses. Depleted incomes make their maintenance difficult enough, but high taxation and death duties render the passage of a great house from father to son almost impossible.’ In her 2019 book White Elephants: The Country House and the State in Independent Ireland, 1922-73, Emer Crooke notes that a large number of houses were just abandoned, with the removal of their roofs so that residential rates would not have to be paid. Furthermore, many such buildings that were destined for demolition suddenly became valuable, ‘not as residences, but as commodities. Houses were bought up for demolition by speculators interested in selling off valuable slates or lead from their roofs, while the Land Commission also demolished some houses on acquired lands, from which they could use the materials to build factories, roads and so on. Big Houses had become far more valuable and useful for their parts than when they were standing.’ Hence the enduring spectacle across the Irish countryside of skeletal remains, towering structures of which only the outer walls now remain. Such might have been the fate of Lisnavagh, County Carlow had its then-owners not decided on an alternative option to ensure at least part of the house continues to be a family home. 

Lisnavagh has been home to the Bunbury family since the 1660s when they moved to County Carlow as tenants of the first Duke of Ormond before purchasing the property in 1702. A plaque inside the present house shows that the original residence on the estate was built by William Bunbury in 1696. This survived for some 150 years until a new Lisnavagh was commissioned by Captain William McClintock-Bunbury who had inherited the property in 1846 following the death of his childless maternal uncle, Thomas Bunbury. Designs for a new house had been commissioned by William Bunbury from architect Oliver Grace in 1778 but following the client’s untimely death, the project was abandoned. Instead, a year after inheriting the estate, Captain McClintock-Bunbury asked Daniel Robertson to come up with a new scheme and this one went ahead. As with a number of Robertson’s other houses in this part of the country, Lisnavagh was constructed in a variant of the Tudor-Gothic style, heavily gabled and with many mullioned windows, all clad in local granite and finished for the sum of £16,000. The work took two and a half years to complete, during which time the same team of workers built new stables ,haylofts, farm buildings, a schoolhouse, several outbuildings, a walled garden, three miles of walls and a gate lodge. A contemporary report in the Farmer’s Gazette noted that ‘Every stone which was used in the various buildings — in the mansion house, the farmyards, demesne walls, and cottages — was dug out of the land, it being quite unnecessary to open a regular quarry, such was the abundance of stones in the land.’ A long, low building of two storeys, the house’s interior featured an abundance of reception and bedrooms which, by the middle of the last century were proving near-impossible to maintain. 

In September 1937 Lisnavagh was inherited by William McClintock-Bunbury, fourth Baron Rathdonnell who, ten years later and in the aftermath of the Second World War, was faced with the challenge of how to look after a very substantial house on a relatively small income. Initially he and his wife, the artist Pamela Drew, put the place up for sale: one potential purchaser was Evelyn Waugh, then travelling through Ireland in the hope of finding a home for himself and his family: he described Lisnavagh as a ‘practical Early Victorian Collegiate building.’ A buyer proving elusive, alternative solutions were sought, with Lady Rathdonnell consulting her uncle,  architect Aubyn Peart Robinson of Caroe & Partners, who suggested the house be reduced in size. Beginning in 1951, driven by the motto ‘Rejuvenate the Positive’, this is what happened. While Peart Robinson planned the operation, work was overseen by architect Alan Hope who ran a highly successful practice in Dublin. The decision was taken to keep the part of the house formerly acting as the service wing, not least because this had a basement, and to clear away the rest of the building which had hitherto held the main reception rooms. However, rather than just demolish a large chunk of Lisnavagh, the Rathdonnells had the granite stones of the western gable taken down by hand, numbered and then re-erected to create a new south-facing front. As a result of careful planning, when the project came to a conclusion in February 1954, rather than looking as though it had lost several limbs, the house gave the impression of having always had the same appearance. Outside, a porte-cochère previously only used by household staff became the main entrance, while indoors a library was created in what had been the old kitchen: in its new incarnation, this is today the finest room in the house, with carved oak shelving by Strahan & Co of Dublin, panels of Cordova leather and many family portraits. Lisnavagh might easily have joined the long sad list of lost Irish country houses but thanks to the clever initiative of its owners in the 1950s, it still stands today. Even more importantly, as Mark Bence-Jones noted in his guide to these properties (1978), ‘the surviving part of the house looks complete in itself; a pleasant Tudor Revival house of medium size rather than a rump of a larger house.’

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