Category Archives: Architectural History

Ill-Advised Indifference


While last Monday’s page told a cheering story of restoration and renewal, today’s story demonstrates that plenty of work remains to be done in order to secure the future of our urban architectural heritage. Waterford city has some fine Georgian buildings, a number of which have been restored in recent years. However, many others have been left to languish, such as that above, no.18 Lady’s Lane. This street was once an important thoroughfare, lined with fine houses of which no.18 is a particularly good example. Thought to date from c.1750, it is of five bays and three storeys, with a particularly splendid staircase and rococo plasterwork. An ugly extension was added to the rear in 1975  when the house served as a men’s hostel (doing so until 2012). Otherwise, despite a fire thought to have been started by vandals, the building retains much of its original character and appearance, although it hasnow  sat empty for many years. Likewise no.22 Lady’s Lane, which is of a later date (c.1800), but likewise of five bays and three storeys, and again suffering neglect. Aside from being a terrible waste of good housing stock, the impression conveyed by such dereliction in the city – where, incidentally, the local authority has hitherto spent over €24 million on consultants’ fees alone for a north quay scheme that has yet to get underway – is that the future Waterford’s historic centre remains under threat from ill-advised indifference.   

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Operation Transformation


Exactly eight years ago, the Irish Aesthete visited No.3 Henrietta Street, Dublin and subsequently wrote about the house (see Opportunity Knocks « The Irish Aesthete). It was then for sale and in pitiable condition, having been turned into a tenement in the last century, with many of the original features such as the main staircase and the main chimney pieces stripped out and rooms subdivided to create more units in which entire families could be accommodated. Like many such buildings in this part of the city, it had been comprehensively degraded and faced an uncertain future. 






As discussed before, the site of 3 Henrietta Street, along with its immediate neighbour, was originally owned by Nathaniel Clements who completed work on the building around 1740-41 and then sold to the Rev. George Stone, Bishop of Ferns. The latter occupied the building but did not finish paying for it, until 1747 when he was appointed Archbishop of Armagh and, in turn, opportunistically moved into the even grander residence at the top of the street constructed for his predecessor in that office, Hugh Boulter. No. 4 was then leased to John Maxwell, MP for County Cavan and later first Lord Farnham. When John Maxwell moved into the house, it came with a plot of land to the immediate east, perhaps serving as a garden. In 1754 Maxwell’s only daughter married another MP, Owen Wynne of Sligo and it is thought that No.3 was built around this time to provide a Dublin residence for the newly-weds. The interior of the building underwent alterations believed to date from 1830: this was perhaps when the main staircase was removed and the double-height entrance hall divided into rooms on two levels. However, particularly on the first floor, the rooms retained much of their original decoration, the pair to the front of the room having a deep frieze with strapwork and festoons, while below the walls were sectioned by plaster panelling. To the rear at this level was a wonderful room with rococo stuccowork in the coved ceiling which extended into the bow. 





As can be seen, when offered for sale in 2016, No.3 Henrietta Street was in poor condition and looked an unattractive proposition for any possible buyer. Fortunately, it found new owners who in the years that followed undertook a thorough, and thoroughly sensitive, restoration of the building. One of their main interventions was the reinstatement of the double-height entrance hall incorporating a staircase such as would have existed when the house was first constructed and as can still be found in a number of other houses on the street (see, for example, No. 7, Relics of Auld Decency « The Irish Aesthete). This completely transforms the interior, making it altogether lighter and offering a better idea of how such buildings would have appeared to both owners and visitors in the 18th century. Upstairs, all the rooms were similarly refurbished, not least the first-floor bow-ended room with its charming coved ceiling with rococo plasterwork. The Irish Aesthete often (perhaps too often for some readers) focuses on loss and debasement of this country’s architectural heritage, so it is a pleasure to offer more cheering news on this occasion, evidence that at least occasionally our historic buildings, can sometimes be brought back from what appears to be the brink of permanent loss. 


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The Ascent to Knowledge


Herewith the entrance hall and main staircase of the King’s Inns’ Library on Henrietta Street, Dublin. The site, located at the top of the thoroughfare, had previously been the location for a large, six-bay house built in the early 18th century for Hugh Boulter, Archbishop of Armagh and thereafter occupied by a number of his successors, hence the street was popularly known as Primate’s Hill. This building was demolished c.1825 and replaced with the present library, designed by Frederick Darley. The double-height reading room on the first floor is accessed via an imperial staircase lit by a large arched window filled with armorial glass made by Michael O’Connor.

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All in the Detail


Now installed on the first-floor landing of the former Bishop’s Palace in Waterford City, this is a detail of a pine chimneypiece carved c.1758 by John Kelly for the Dublin residence of artist Robert West. Not to be confused with the near-contemporaneous stuccodore of the same name, West was born in Waterford, the son of an alderman, and trained in Paris, seemingly with both Boucher and van Loo before returning to Ireland and establishing a school of drawing in Dublin. By the mid-1740s, this was being subsidised by the Dublin Society, with premiums offered to students by Samuel Madden and annual exhibitions of their work held in the House of Lords. Unfortunately West became mentally ill in 1763 and had to be replaced as head of the school; he returned briefly to the position in 1770 before dying the same year.


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How the Mighty have Fallen


‘Sir Lucas Dillon, father of the first Earl of Roscommon, and son of Sir Robert Dillon, who was Attorney-General to Henry VIII, built the castle and church of Moymett, after having received the grants of the Abbey of the Virgin Mary at Trim, and the townlands of Ladyrath, Grange of Trim, Cannonstown and Rathnally, in the year 1567.’
From ‘A Continuation of Notes on Sepia Sketches of Various Antiquities presented to the Library of the Royal Irish Academy’ by George V Du Noyer, in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Vol. VII, 1862.





The tomb of Sir Lucas Dillon (c.1530-1593) and his first wife Jane Bathe in Newtown Trim, County Meath has featured here before (see Former Greatness « The Irish Aesthete). As mentioned above, he was the eldest son of Sir Robert Dillon, and member of a Norman family which had settled in Ireland in the 12th century and thereafter prospered. A Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas, Sir Robert, despite being Roman Catholic, assisted in the English crown in the dissolution of monasteries in Ireland and in 1537 was granted a 21-year lease of the demesne of St Peter’s at in Newtown Trim and three years later was allowed to buy the property (in 1546 he also purchased the Carmelite monastery at Athcarne, Co. Meath). Like his father, Lucas Dillon became a lawyer and in 1565 was appointed Solicitor General for Ireland. He would later become Attorney General, a member of the Irish Parliament, Chief Baron of the Exchequer (succeeding his late father-in-law), and then a member of the Irish Privy Council. During this period, he acquired the land at Moymet, some four miles north-west of Newtown Trim which he also owned. Again like his father, he acted in the service of the English government: in Terry Clavin’s entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, he notes that Dillon ‘believed that the best means of pacifying Ireland was by the extension of the common law to all corners of the island.’ He was especially close to Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland 1565-71 and again 1575-78 and accompanied the latter on his tours of Ireland; Sidney knighted Dillon in 1575. Inevitably as he grew older, the number of Dillon’s enemies increased – he often faced charges of corruption – but he managed to hold on to his offices until he died in 1593. His eldest son James would become first Earl of Roscommon, despite remaining Roman Catholic, although (although subsequent generations conformed to the Established Church).





In their guide to North Leinster, Professors Casey and Rowan described the buildings at Moymet as ‘a rare microcosm of late medieval life in Ireland.’ The ensemble begins with a substantial three-storey gatehouse, comprising an entrance archway, once vaulted, with a number of rooms above. On the west side, a narrow vaulted chamber has a spiral staircase in one corner giving access to the upper level. A short distance south of this lie the remains of the castle which would have served as the Dillons’ residence. Although now in poor condition, this was originally of four storeys, presumably with a typical vaulted chamber on the ground floor (none of the interior divisions survive). Several large window and chimney openings survive, as well as a garderobe in the south-east corner of the structure. There is also, seemingly a much-worn sheela-na-gig figure on the east wall, but the presence of an excessively inquisitive herd of cattle prevented the Irish Aesthete from seeing this. A long, low range to the immediate west probably acted as a service block. Meanwhile, further west of the castle stands a similarly ruined church, once dedicated to St Brigid. Like the other buildings on this site, it is thought to have been built, or perhaps rebuilt by Sir Luke Dillon since the church is in two parts, the nave wider than the chancel and lit by slender windows with trefoils carved into the spandrels, each then capped with hood moulding.  An internal staircase in the north-east corner of the nave formerly gave access to the rood-loft, where most likely a priest lived. At the east end, the chancel closes in a large rectangular window divided into three with ogee arches and, once more, a hood moulding over the whole. The church appears to have been damaged during the Confederate Wars of the 1640s and then abandoned, as were the nearby castle and its associated structures, leaving the whole to fall into decay.


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Some Highly Picturesque Remains



As the year draws to a close, some pictures of what remains of Corickmore, County Tyrone, a religious house founded c.1465 for Franciscans of the Third Order. The establishment had a relatively short life, being granted in 1603 to Sir Henry Piers and thereafter being allowed to fall into ruin. In Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837), we read ‘There are some highly picturesque remains of this abbey, affording an idea of the original extent and elegance of the buildings.’ Such is no longer the case, since only the east wall and window of the church survives in any substance, the rest of the building being reduced to low sections of masonry. The surrounding grounds, heavily overgrown, are filled with gravestones, some of which date back to the 17th century, not long after the site would have been relinquished by the Franciscans.



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Behind the Scenes


Owing to the popularity of films and television series, perhaps most notably ‘Downton Abbey’, recent years have seen an increased interest in and awareness of life in what used to be called ‘below stairs.’ Indeed, most country houses open to the public report that visitors today are often far more engaged by what were once the servants’ quarters than they are in the building’s main reception rooms, no matter how splendidly decorated and furnished the latter may be. It is as though the audience at a theatre now prefers to spend time examining what takes place behind the scenes rather than watch the action on stage. Which is not to disparage either that interest or indeed the lives of those who were once employed in the Irish ‘Big House,’ the latter being deservedly the subject of increased scrutiny among historians.
In this country, although the work of servants was not hugely different from that of their equivalents elsewhere, it did have some distinctive characteristics. To begin with, there were often more of them than might be the case in other European countries, including our nearest neighbour. When Arthur Young toured Ireland in the second half of the 1770s, he noted that servants’ wages in Ireland were on average some thirty per cent cheaper than in England (and that there was no servants’ tax here). This may at least in part explain why most country house owners employed more of them. However, according to Young, the reason there were more servants was due ‘not only to the general laziness, but also to the number of attendants everyone of a higher class will have; this is common in great families in England, but in Ireland a man of five hundred a year feels it.’ In other words, in order to demonstrate your lofty status, you employed a lot of servants, even if there was little for them to do. When Sir James Caldwell visited the Earl of Belvedere in County Westmeath in 1773, he and two other gentlemen were not only entertained to a lavish dinner by their host but also waited upon by four valets de chambre and seven or eight footmen. ‘If the Lord-Lieutenant had dined there,’ Sir James thought, ‘there could not have been a more elegant entertainment.’
Almost forty years earlier, Samuel Madden in his Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland also commented on the large number of servants found in Irish country establishments. ‘We keep many of them in our houses,’ he wrote, ‘as we do our plate on our sideboards, more for show than for use, and rather to let people see that we have them than that we have any occasion for them.’ (Madden also thought that servants during this period, ‘are so excessively paid for being so useless and debauched, and at the same time such compleat masters of their business, that they cheat us, when they think fit, and obey us only when they judge it reasonable.’ One suspects that the servants in question might have had a different opinion of the matter). 





In Two Centuries of Life in Down (1920), John Stevenson cites an account book kept between 1781 and 1797 by Anne Savage of Portaferry House, in which the wages of various servants are listed as follows:
Maids (duties unstated): £3 to £3, 8sh and 3d per annum
Ladies’ maids: £4, 1sh and 10d to £8 per annum
House Maids: £4 to £5 per annum
Kitchen maid: £3 per annum
Man Cook:: £12 per annum
Butler: £13, 13sh per annum
Footman: £9, 20sh per annum
Postilion (‘to keep himself in shirts, shoes and stockings’): £3, 8sh and 3d per annum
2nd Postilion (‘to keep himself in Boots, Britches and Linen’): £5, 13sh and 9d per annum
Coachman: £11, 7sh and 6d
Groom: £8
Stevenson also quotes some of Mrs Savage’s comments about the servants which could, on occasion, be quite savage. Of one Elizabeth Keley, she wrote that after two years of service, she was discharged ‘by her own desire. She is sober, Honest, Quiet but not a very good housemaid.’ Mary Walker, meanwhile, left employment at Portaferry House after a year, again of her own volition, Mrs Savage observing ‘She is a very good Servant and very honest. Neither sober nor quiet. I willingly part with her.’ Six months later, Mary Walker returned to the same position, but after 18 months again left, her former employer describing her as ‘a very good servant’ but ‘she drinks and is very bad tempered in that situation.’ Other female servants received even worse reviews from their erstwhile mistress, one being dismissed as good only when it pleased her, although ‘neither sober nor quiet’ while another, although sober and honest was also judged ‘Dirty, Disorderly and pert.’ Again, it would be interesting to know what these women thought of Mrs Savage as an employer. 





Although architects’ plans often indicate accommodation for servants in an Irish country house, this was not always carried through, and especially in the 17th and earlier part of the 18th centuries, at least some employees were left to sleep where they could – hugger-mugger on pallets in the kitchen, or, if they were personal maids and the like, in their master or mistress’s dressing room. Sometimes they would find a bed in what was termed the ‘barrack room’, a large dormitory space usually on the top floor of the building; these could also be employed for guests if a large number of single gentlemen came to stay for a few days. The one consistent feature was that male and female servants were required to sleep in different rooms or areas.
Service in an Irish country house differed from that elsewhere in a number of respects. In Country and Town in Ireland under the Georges (1940), Constantia Maxwell pointed out that two categories of servants were peculiar to here: the gossoon and the ‘running footman.’ As she explained, the gossoon (from the French garçon) was a young boy, effectively a slave to the cook and the butler; ‘that is to say that he did the drudgery of the house.’ Barefoot, gossoons were frequently sent on messages elsewhere and were known to cover extraordinary distances – up to fifty miles – in one day. Similarly running footmen took messages or letters to other parts of the surrounding country, carrying a long pole which they used for jumping over bogs, hedges and ditches. They might also be sent ahead, when the house owner was travelling, to find and prepare lodgings in an inn, ‘for they were chosen for their reliability as well as their strength.’
Servants’ tunnels were another common characteristic of Irish country houses, only occasionally encountered elsewhere. These long covered passageways were designed to lead from one part of the property to another without those using them being seen by the owners of the house: provisions, fuel and so forth could thus be moved around the building almost invisibly. The example shown here is typical of such tunnels, long and straight, large enough if necessary to accommodate a donkey and cart, with a vaulted roof and usually – but not always – intermittent openings permitting natural light to enter the space. Today, the servants’ tunnel is largely redundant, as indeed are most of the other spaces which were once the domain of country house staff. In this instance, even if there is still life on the main stage, today little takes place behind the scenes. 


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A Summer Memory


As we approach the winter solstice, a visit from precisely six months ago to Primrose Hill which sits above the village of Lucan, County Dublin. The house is a late 18th century villa, the design of which has been sometimes attributed to architect James Gandon. Today, it sits amid several acres of gardens developed by the present owner and his late parents.



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The Fate of Carrigafoyle Castle


‘Carrick and Carrig are the names of nearly seventy townlands, villages and towns, and form the beginning of about 555 others; craig and creag are represented by the various forms Crag, Craig, Creg, &c., and these constitute or begin about 250 names; they mean primarily a rock, but they are sometimes applied to rocky island.
Carrigafoyle, an island in the Shannon, near Ballylongford, Kerry, with the remains of Carrigafoyle castle near the shore, the chief seat of the O’Conors Kerry, is called in the annals, Carraig-an-phoill, the rock of the hole; and it took its name from a deep hole in the river immediately under the castle.’
From The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places by P.W. Joyce (1869)





‘Sir William Pelham and the earl of Ormond set out early this year [1580] on a fresh campaign in Desmond’s territory; the first marching first to Limerick in the beginning of February, and the latter to Cork, and both forming a junction at the foot of Slieve Mis, near Tralee. They spared neither age nor sex in their march, and, owing to the state of desolation to which the country had been reduced, suffered not a little inconvenience themselves for want of provisions. They then marched northwards to destroy the castles still garrisoned by Desmond’s men, and first laid siege to the strong castle of Carrigafoyle (Carrig-an-phuill) situated in an islet in the Shannon, on the coast of Kerry. The Four Masters say that Pelham landed some heavy ordnance from Sir William Winter’s fleet, which arrived on the Irish coast about this time, and battered a portion of the castle, crushing some of the warders beneath the ruins; but other annalists make no mention of cannon landed from the ships.’
From The History of Ireland, Ancient and Modern by Martin Haverty (1867)





‘For the rebels it was a losing game all through. Pelham and Ormond took Desmond’s strongholds one by one. Carrigafoyle Castle on the south shore of the Shannon was his strongest fortress. It was valiantly defended by fifty Irishmen and nineteen Spaniards, commanded by Count Julio an Italian engineer: but after being by cannon until a breach was made, it was taken by storm about the 27th March. Without delay the whole garrison, including Julio with six Spaniards and some women, were hanged or put to the sword…A few days after the capture of this fortress the garrisons of some others of Desmond’s castles, including Askeaton, abandoned them, terrified by the fate of Carrigafoyle.’
From A Short History of Ireland, from the Earliest Times to 1608 by P.W. Joyce (1893)


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An Ideal Gift


Clandeboye, County Down

Deel Castle, County Mayo

36 Westland Row, Dublin 

2024 has been a somewhat busy year for the Irish Aesthete with, among other projects, the publication of three books over the course of the past 12 months. The first of these, The Irish Aesthete: Buildings of Ireland, Lost and Found, published by Lilliput Press, is a collection of one’s own photographs, with accompanying explanatory texts, covering the entire island of Ireland and ranging from happily intact country houses to ruined castles, from entire interiors to decorative details; a distillation of more than a decade of near-ceaseless exploration of this country’s architectural heritage.
In September, The Irish Country House: A New Vision was published by Rizzoli. With photographs by Luke White, this is an opportunity to offer an alternative vision of a Ireland’s historic homes, so often portrayed (not least by the Irish Aesthete) as sadly blighted and almost beyond redemption. On the contrary, as the book shows across 15 different properties spread around the country, there is an alternative story to be told. Instead of decay and demolition, here are cheering tales of revival and restoration, of plucky individuals taking on the challenge of bringing new life to old houses, and so  ensuring their survival, to be enjoyed by future generations.


Ballysallagh, County Kilkenny

Moyglare House, County Kildare

Tullanisk, County Offaly

Most recently, A Vanishing World: The Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne appeared, courtesy of Messenger Publications. A Jesuit priest, Francis Browne was also an ardent and extremely competent amateur photographer who in the years leading up to his death in 1960 at the age of 80, began to visit country houses and take pictures of their interiors. Today these are invaluable documents since a number of the places he photographed have since been destroyed while many others have changed hands or lost most of their original contents. Fr Browne’s images show these houses, avant le déluge, when still intact, their appearance little changed over the centuries.
For anyone seeking a something suitable this Christmas, the Irish Aesthete makes so bold as to propose that any – or indeed all – of these books would make an ideal gift…


Malahide Castle, County Dublin 

Rockingham, County Roscommon

Shelton Abbey, County Wicklow

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