Meanwhile, Elsewhere in Ballinrobe…

Sep7

On the road leading from Castlebar into Ballinrobe, County Mayo can be seen the ruins of the old Roman Catholic chapel. With financial support from the local landlord James Cuffe, first (and last) Lord Tyrawley work began on the cruciform building in 1815, in other words some years before the Emancipation Act of 1829. It is notable for being more ample than were many such Catholic churches of the period, for having a splendid four-storey bell tower at the east end, and for fine limestone wall monuments to its earliest parish priests on either side of the crossing. However within decades the building appears to have been deemed insufficient to local needs since a successor was begun closer to the centre of the town in 1849. Before the end of the 19th century the old chapel was unroofed and today its shell languishes on a patch of ground surrounded by housing estates.

Escaping a Family Curse

Sep5

In 1824 the former courtesan Harriette Wilson advised a number of her ex-lovers that in return for a consideration of £200 she would omit their names from the memoirs she was then writing. The Duke of Wellington is famously said to have retorted ‘Publish and be damnned.’ He duly appeared in the book, as did another Irishman, James Lennox Naper. By the time the work appeared Naper was a respectably married man living on his estate in County Meath. However, the tale recounted by Wilson concerned his life more than a decade earlier, when he was a young Member of Parliament living in London and conducting a liaison with the author’s friend and sister-courtesan Julia Johnstone. The latter was at least fourteen years older than her lover (Harriette Wilson thought he looked more like her son) and she did not find him especially attractive. Nevertheless, she was urged by Wilson to respond to his ardours, not least for the sake of Johnstone’s many children: ‘”Napier [sic] is your man”,’ Wilson told her. ‘”Since you could be unchaste to gratify your own passions, I am sure it cannot be wrong to secure the comfort and protection of six beautiful children.” “But Napier’s vanity makes me sick,” retorted Julia, impatiently. “The possession of my person would not satisfy him. He wants me to declare and prove that I love him; and the thing is physically impossible”.’ Eventually she overcame her reluctance, but the match was never very happy. On one occasion Wilson discussed the matter with her sister Fanny, ‘”Oh, he is horridly stingy,” answered Fanny, “and Julia is obliged to affect coldness and refuse him the slightest favour till he brings her money; otherwise she would get nothing out of him. Yet he seems to be passionately fond of her, and writes sonnets to her beauty, styling her, at forty, although the mother of nine children, ‘his beautiful maid’.”‘ The affair only ended with Johnstone’s death in 1815.

In 1593 the Dorset-born judge Robert Napier was knighted and sent to Ireland as Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer. He appears to have been singularly inept at his job, forever complaining about this country’s climate and seeking a better position on the other side of the Irish Sea. In 1600 he travelled to England and thereafter refused to return to Ireland. Accordingly he was suspended from office in 1601 and replaced the following year. Nonetheless, during the short period he held office, Sir Robert managed to found the family’s fortunes here, and in the third quarter of the 17th century his grandson James Naper further improved it by marrying Dorothy Petty, sister of Sir William Petty whose own descendants would eventually become Marquesses of Lansdowne. A series of strategic marriages meant that the Napers eventually came to own some 180,000 acres of land, with their main seat being at Loughcrew, County Meath. This was the estate inherited by Charles Lennox Naper who, despite being so stingy to poor Julia Johnstone, was believed to enjoy an annual income of more than £20,000. A considerable amount of it was ultimately spent on Loughcrew, where around the time Naper’s name featured in Harriette Wilson’s memoirs, he commissioned a substantial new residence designed by Charles Cockerel.

Naper’s splendid house is no more: over the course of less than 100 years Loughcrew suffered three fires and was not rebuilt after the last of these. Only part of the building’s portico was re-erected in recent years, while adjacent outbuildings were converted to provide accommodation. The greater part of the estate has likewise gone, and little remains to demonstrate the former wealth of this family. Yet here and there in the surrounding landscape are remnants indicating how extensive was the demesne and how ambitious once its owners’ notions. Today’s pictures show the Rustic Lodge, one of at least six formerly marking approaches to the house, each of them different in design from the others. As its name indicates, this lodge is resolutely pastoral in concept, and might almost have been conceived as a nest in which Naper could conduct subsequent romances. Believed to date from c.1840 the two-storey building’s ground floor features a blind arcade resting on rusticated stone piers, with openings for door and mullioned casement windows. The upper level is of yellow brick, with a patterned roof of slates and tiles, the two chimney stacks being again in rusticated stone. What remains of the interior suggests a similar character, the chimneypieces once more in rusticated stone and the entrance hall’s coved wooden ceiling almost alpine in spirit. The prettiest feature is a spiral staircase tucked into a corner of the former sitting room whence it sinuously climbs to the first floor before concluding in a final coquettish swirl of iron balusters. Now in poor condition, with the surrounding woodland encroaching ever nearer and the climate Sir Robert Napier so disliked having an impact on the fabric, one worries this lodge, like much else at Loughcrew, might be lost forever. It is said the main house on the estate suffered from a curse: ‘Three times will Loughcrew be consumed by fire. Crows will fly in and out of the windows. Grass will grow on its doorstep.’ All being well, the Rustic Lodge will escape this fate and enjoy a happier future.

The Tiger Awakes

Sep3

On the gates of Cranmore House in Ballinrobe, County Mayo hangs a planning application notice which proposes the construction here of a three-storey retail and residential block, a second three-storey block to be used as an old persons’ home, seven houses, a terrace featuring that strange new form of accommodation, the ‘townhouse’ and, adjacent to the existing structure, a new 46-bedroom hotel with the inevitable function rooms, bars, gym and swimming pool. Cranmore House was built in 1838 by Alexander Clendenning Lambert, agent for the Knox family to whom the property subsequently reverted. They remained in occupation until the 1920s after which the house passed through a couple of hands before being unroofed in the 1950s, in which condition it remains to the present. The predominantly greenfield nature of site makes it attractive to developers, although the proposal seems both unfortunate and unnecessary when so much of Ballinrobe immediately outside the gates could do with refurbishment, including many existing ‘townhouses.’

Glory be to God for Dappled Things

Aug31

On the eastern side of Library Square runs the oldest extant range of buildings within the walls of Trinity College, Dublin. Dating from c.1700, the Rubrics was once matched by similar blocks to the west and north (the south side is taken up by Thomas Burgh’s Great Library, on which work began in 1712). The other sides have long since been either cleared or replaced, but the Rubrics remains, albeit somewhat truncated and with new brick facing added in the late 19th century. Nevertheless, it provides an impression of how the college must have appeared during the early Georgian period.

Situated in a Widely Extended Demesne

Aug29

‘Through hills at the foot of Bessy Bell …we come to Baronscourt, Lord Abercorn’s magnificent seat….the great number of fine oaks and three long narrow lakes which ornament this place give it an air of great grandeur.’
Rev. Daniel Beaufort (1786)

‘In the vicinity is Baronscourt, the seat of the Marquess of Abercorn, a stately mansion, situated in a widely extended demesne, combining much romantic and beautiful scenery, embellished with three spacious lakes, and enriched with fine timber.’
Samuel Lewis (1837)

An Uncertain Future

Aug27

The ubiquity of older buildings in Irish towns and villages suffering from insufficient maintenance. Here two fine houses, both probably early 19th century, in Greyabbey, County Down. Above is 88-90 Main Street, below 2 Church Street, the latter closing the long vista down Main Street and therefore sited at a critical point in the village. Both excellent properties that once held commercial premises, both now looking as though facing an uncertain future.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate

Aug24

The façade of the former gaol in Tullamore, County Offaly, the only portion of this building to survive (all that lay behind was demolished in 1937-38). Designed by surveyor and canal engineer John Killaly, a plaque above the machiolated gatehouse reads: ‘The first stone of this prison was laid by Charles William Baron Tullamore on the 13th day of September in the year of our Lord 1826 under the 7th year of the reign of his most gracious majesty George the fourth.’ While the gaol is hard to miss, its entrance gates are likely often overlooked: note how the cast-iron piers are composed of bound bundles of staves from the centre of each rises an axe finial.

A Sick Building

Aug20

Last Monday, the Irish Times published a feature on the threatened demolition of a former Church of Ireland primary school in Glasthule, County Dublin: an application has been lodged with the local authority for the present building to be replaced by four so-called ‘townhouses.’ Objections have been raised to this plan on the grounds that humanitarian and Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement may have attended the school, thereby linking it to the 1916 Easter Rising, the centenary of which is being commemorated this year. However on Wednesday the same newspaper carried a letter from one of Casement’s biographers outlining the peripatetic nature of his upbringing and thus confuting the notion that he had ever been educated in the Glasthule establishment.
Above is an image of the former County Meath Infirmary on Bridge Street, Navan. A decade younger than the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, it dates from the mid-18th century, at which time, according to a subsequent account, ‘The gentlemen in the neighbourhood of Navan, from their observation of the various calamities and miseries the poor undergo,for want of proper and timely assistance in their several maladies and disorders, did propose to found a County Hospital. Accordingly a subscription was opened at an Assembly at Navan, the first of October 1753; and soon after the Foundation of a County Hospital was laid on a convenient and healthy situation, on an eminence at the entrance into the town.’ A plaque above the main entrance carries the date 1754 and a quotation from St Mark’s Gospel: ‘I was sick and you visited me.’
A supposedly protected structure the seven-bay, three storey County Infirmary (its premises extended in the 19th century) continued to serve the locality until finally closed in September 2010. The building stood vacant before finally being sold three years later. It has remained empty and visibly deteriorating ever since. As can be seen, several of the windows are now broken, there are slates missing from the roof and the fabric is clearly suffering. Designed to tend the sick, now the building itself is in need of care. Unlike the former school premises in Glasthule, the County Infirmary can claim no connection with someone famous (although a plaque linking it with the 1916 Rising has recently been placed on the outside wall). Perhaps for this reason there appears to be little public concern over its present state and future survival. Yet in a town which retains precious few historic buildings of any merit, this is an important link to the past and to the generous philanthropists who funded its construction and medical endeavours. Is it enough to believe we should only preserve our architectural heritage provided there is a link, however putative or fanciful, to dead patriots (and even that has too often proven an insufficient safeguard)? Should we not value a building on its own merits, whether as a tangible part of our history, as an important legacy to pass on to the next generation or even – heretical thought – due to inherent aesthetic excellence? Both the Glasthule schoolhouse and the County Infirmary in Navan, together with thousands of other properties across the country, need to be considered on all these terms and not just because someone now held in esteem may or may not once have crossed their thresholds.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Aug17

Located in the centre of north Dublin, the debtors’ prison on Green Street was built in 1794 and offers a fascinating insight into the city’s history. Constructed from granite and limestone and U-shaped in form, it rises three storeys over basement. The prison contained thirty-three cells, or rooms, available either furnished or unfurnished. These were occupied by debtors until they had paid off all outstanding obligations, but despite its appearance conditions in the building were not necessarily grim. Inmates often brought in their own food, and were permitted visitors: in effect, the place served as a kind of hotel from which guests were not allowed to leave. It was later used as a police barracks and accommodation for police widows.
At one time threatened with demolition (for one of the road widening schemes with which the city council was for a while obsessed) in the 1990s the former prison was leased by the Office of Public Works to a charitable body, the Green Street Trust, which undertook a considerable amount of restoration work with the intention of ensuring community use for the property. Unfortunately this imaginative initiative stalled due to want of funds and the prison was returned to the OPW: since then it has stood empty and the building has fallen into a vulnerable state (it now features on An Taisce’s Buildings at Risk register).
Last Monday, the Department of Public Expenditure and the Office of Public Works went to court to secure the removal from the debtors’ prison of a group of squatters who had moved into the property, the plaintiffs arguing the site was not safe. Interestingly there appears to have been no discussion of how or why the building had become unsafe, nor indeed which public bodies were responsible for its upkeep (not least ensuring it could not be accessed by unauthorised persons). Presumably had the property been kept both safe and secure, the Department of Public Expenditure and the Office of Public Works would not have needed to go to court (and presumably would not have had to pay lawyers’ fees). The debtors’ prison is listed by Dublin City Council as a protected structure: this seems not to have prevented it falling into the present poor condition. If the state does not abide by its own legislation regarding the care of protected structures, why should private individuals and companies be expected to behave any better towards historic buildings in their possession?
Photograph by Ciarán Cuffe.

An Architectural Conundrum

Aug15

The first official police force in this country, the Royal Irish Constabulary, owed its origins to Sir Robert Peel, Chief Secretary in Ireland 1812-18. Two years into his term of office, he introduced the Peace Preservation Act which allowed fir the establishment of a force that would maintain law and order, especially in rural districts where civil disarray was less easy to control. Thanks to his association with this initiative, the force became popularly known as Peelers or, more commonly in England where similar legislation was later passed, as Bobbies. The Irish Constabulary Act of 1822 established a police force in each province with chief constables and inspectors general under the authority of central government in Dublin. Further legislation in 1836 led to what thereafter was called the Royal Irish Constabulary, an organisation which by 1841 numbered more than 8,600 men. At the beginning of the last century that figure had climbed to some 11,000 constables spread over 1,600 premises, these generally known as barracks.

Although the majority of them were drawn from the locality in which they served, members of the RIC were often unpopular, since they were charged with implementing the authority of the British regime. Hence once the War of Independence began in the aftermath of the First World War, they – and their barracks – were an obvious target for the rebel forces. In the years 1919-21, 513 members of the RIC were killed, while a further 682 were wounded. Many others quit the force: over a three-month period in 1920, for example, 600 men resigned from the force. Unable to maintain control over such a large number of premises, the RIC began to abandon smaller rural barracks: again in the first quarter of 1920, 500 buildings – of different sizes but predominantly in more remote areas – were evacuated. Within months the IRA had destroyed more than 400 of these, seemingly at least 300 in April alone. One of those deliberately gutted by fire during that period is the building shown here.

The barracks at Clomantagh, County Kilkenny was, as its name indicates, once occupied by a local division of the RIC. Accordingly the local authority dates the building to the middle of the 19th century. However, a stone on the central bell tower is dated 1805 – that is to say nine years before the first police force was established in Ireland – and furthermore the architectural character of the structure is more interesting than was typical of police barracks around the country (which were usually of a utilitarian design). Of two storeys, the building is semi-circular in shape with three elliptical-headed, cut limestone carriageways at its centre, that below the bell tower given a breakfront. The most obvious comparison is with the stable block at Kilkenny Castle some fourteen miles away. Built at the close of the 18th century, this is similarly crescent-shaped, of two storeys and with elliptical-headed carriageways on the ground floor. Clomantagh ‘barracks’ looks like a somewhat less sophisticated version of the castle stables, but it has elegant decorative details such as the round-headed niches found both inside and out. Directly across the road there used to be a seven-storey flour mill dating from c.1775: this was only demolished in 2005. Surely there must have been some connection between that building and what is now called the barracks, even if the latter subsequently became used by the RIC? It is an architectural conundrum, one the present owners, who have already undertaken a considerable amount of essential remedial work and intend to undertake more, would wish to resolve. Their public spiritedness in ensuring the building has a future needs to be matched by discovering more about its past.

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