Category Archives: Architectural History

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi




The scant remains of Lixnaw Court, County Kerry. From the mid-13th to the late 18th century, this was a seat of the FitzMaurices, Barons Kerry. In 1723 the 21st Baron, Thomas FitzMaurice, was created first Earl of Kerry: 30 years earlier, he had married Anne Petty, only daughter of Sir William Petty. The earl was a proud and arrogant man: according to his grandson, the first Earl of Shelburne, he ‘did not want the manners of the country nor the habits of his family to make him a tyrant. He was so by nature. He was the most severe character which can be imagined, obstinate and inflexible…His children did not love him, but dreaded him; his servants the same.’ This provincial plutocrat transformed Lixnaw where, wrote his younger son John FitzMaurice, he spent ‘great sums building and furnishing a very large mansion-house’ along with making many other improvements in the gardens and demesne. However, all his work had started to fall into decay even before the end of the century thanks to the disinterest and extravagance of the third Earl of Kerry. Following the latter’s death in 1818, what remained of the estate was inherited by a cousin, Henry Petty-FitzMaurice, third Marquess of Lansdowne, whose Kerry base was in the south of the county. In consequence, the once splendid house and gardens at Lixnaw were left to moulder, as can be seen in Cornelius Varley’s painting of 1842. Today, a few outer walls survive and, in the surrounding countryside, evidence of the first earl’s great landscaping enterprises, not least a long canal which would once have been a feature of the formal Baroque garden.



A Spouse’s Savings



In October 1981 Christie’s held an auction on its premises in London, offering the studio contents of an Irish artist who had died 40 years earlier and, until this sale, had been largely forgotten. The artist in question was Mildred Anne Butler, born into a gentry family in County Kilkenny in 1858. Following her father’s death in 1881, she trained in London and then travelled elsewhere in Europe to improve her technique, specialising in watercolour. By 1892 she was exhibiting with the Watercolour Society of Ireland and she also showed work at both the Royal Academy in London and the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. Throughout her life, the same subjects recurred: primarily birds, animals such as cattle and garden scenes, usually recorded  from the immediate surroundings of Kilmurry, her family home in County Kilkenny. Here she lived until her death in October 1941 at the age of 83: although one of six children, she survived all her siblings, none of whom had offspring, and so she inherited the property. She bequeathed Kilmurry and its contents to a distant cousin,  Doreen Archer Houblon and it was only a few years after the latter’s death that the contents of Butler’s studio were offered for sale. It was an opportune moment, since this style of work had begun to come back into fashion: Edith Holden’s Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, which came out in 1977, had been a publishing sensation, selling over one million copies in its first year. And the work of another Irish watercolourist and contemporary of Mildred Anne Butler, Rose Barton, was also experiencing a revival in popularity. Ever since then, Kilmurry has been associated with Butler but the story of an earlier owner is just as interesting, if not more so. 





Kilmurry is a house that has been enlarged and altered on many occasions but the core of it, perhaps the section that forms the inner hall, is thought to date back to the 17th century, perhaps around the time that the lands here were granted to Colonel John Bushe. Originally an entrance hall with flanking reception rooms, what is today  the main drawing room appears to have been added around the mid-18th century by the colonel’s grandson, Reverend Thomas Bushe, Rector of Gowran, Prebendary of Inniscarra, and Chaplain of King’s College, Mitchelstown, Co. Cork. According to Richard Lalor Sheil, the Rev. Bushe ‘was in the enjoyment of a lucrative living, and being of an ancient family, which had established itself in Ireland in the reign of Charles the Second, he thought it incumbent upon him to live upon a scale of expenditure more consistent with Irish notions of dignity than English maxims of economy and good sense.’ In other words, he was inclined to allow expenditure to exceed income and in consequence fell badly into debt. In 1767 the Rev. Bushe and his wife Catherine had a son, Charles Kendal Bushe, whose middle name arose from the following circumstances. One night an elderly man called Kendal, who lived not far away on what is now the Mount Juliet estate, sought refuge at Kilmurry, having been attacked and robbed by highwaymen. So grateful was Mr Kendal for the assistance provided by the Bushes that, when he died, he left all his property to the family, on condition that the eldest son should bear his name. It will not come as a surprise that the Rev Bushe, owing to his impecunious state, subsequently sold this unexpected inheritance. Meanwhile his son Charles Kendal, became an extremely successful lawyer: in due course he would act as Solicitor-General for Ireland (1805-1822) and then Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench for Ireland (1822-1841). Unfortunately, as a young man he had signed some papers presented to him by his father without knowing what they contained: at the age of 21, he discovered that he was saddled with some £30,000 worth of parental debts. Kilmurry, which he adored, had to be sold and he left Ireland to avoid creditors. Meanwhile, the feckless Rev Bushe retired to his living in Mitchelstown. 





In December 1793 Charles Kendal Bushe married Anne Crampton and thanks to her dowry – and a loan from a friend – he was able to pay off his most pressing creditors and return to Ireland where his career flourished. Nevertheless, he was never rich and so, in 1814 when Kilmurry was once more offered for sale, he lacked the necessary funds to repurchase his old family home. That is, until his wife told him that she had saved all the money he had given her over the years to buy jewellery and other items: the sum was sufficient to cover the purchase price, and the Bushes now moved back to Kilmurry. It is likely that soon after this further alterations were made to the property. The  west-facing, five-bay building, its limestone parapet lined with urns, which had been added by the Rev Bushe was now flanked by single-storey wings with tripartite windows and dies surmounted by sphinxes. A new, severely neo-classical entrance was created on the north front with Doric pilasters and half-columns. Immediately inside is the hall, with the library to the right and the dining room to the right. Continuing through the house, the next space is a substantial inner hall (as mentioned, likely to be the oldest part of the building) with the drawing room to the right and staircase hall to the left, the latter leading to what were formerly service quarters. To the rear lies an orangery (once Mildred Anne Butler’s studio) which looks over the two-acre walled garden. Despite his passion for the place, after Charles Kendal Bushe died in 1843 his children sold Kilmurry, the new owner being Captain Henry Butler, father of Mildred Anne Butler and himself a talented artist. Creativity ran in the family, because the dining room in Kilmurry contains an extraordinary chimneypiece, elaborately carved by another of the captain’s daughters, Isabel Butler, together with a local carpenter. Unfortunately, following the death of Doreen Archer Houblon, all the contents of the house were sold, not just Mildred Anne Butler’s studio, but the furniture and some 5,000 books in the library. Kilmurry then went into a period of serious decline before being bought and wonderfully restored by the present owners. More recently they have placed the property on the market: perhaps the house awaits another Anne Kendal Bushe with her secret stash of funds…


Going Nowhere



The Glandore Gate, which once marked the main entrance to the Ardfert Abbey estate in County Kerry. Of limestone ashlar and flanked by battlemented walls, with a two-bay single-storey flat-roofed Gothic Revival style gate lodge to one side, the gate was constructed c.1815 for John Crosbie, second (and last) Earl of Glandore, whose coat of arms, topped with a peer’s coronet, can be seen above the arched entrance. Originally on a site further south, the gates were moved to their present position in 1880 by then-owner of the estate, William Talbot-Crosbie. The present gates evidently date from that period, since that on the left features the Talbot-Crosbie crest and motto  (Indignante invidia florebit Justus – Despising envy, the just shall flourish), while that on the right has the crest and motto of the Talbots, Earls of Shrewsbury (Prest d’Accomplir – Ready to accomplish). Ardfert Abbey was gutted by fire in August 1922 during the Civil War, and the ruins subsequently demolished, so that today the gates lead nowhere, while the adjacent lodge has been converted into a private dwelling. 


Next Tuesday, 7th February at 6pm, I shall be speaking about the destruction of Ardfert Abbey, among a number of other houses, during a talk Left without a Handkerchief: Stories of Country House Loss, which may be attended live or watched online. For further information about this event, please see: IGS Lecture: Left Without a Handkerchief: Stories of Country House Loss | Irish Georgian Society

Neglecting History


The background to the appearance of workhouses around Ireland in the 19th century has been discussed here before (see Silent Witness « The Irish Aesthete). In total, 163 such institutions were constructed, one of them on a six-acre site to the immediate south of Tipperary town. Overseen by a Board of Guardians, in November 1839 a Poor Law Union had been established in this part of the country and the workhouse soon followed; built of limestone in a loosely Tudorbethan manner and at a cost of £6,240 plus a further £1,110 for fixtures and fittings, it received the first occupants in July 1841. As was the case with all other such properties, this one was designed by the Poor Laws Commissioners’ architect George Wilkinson and intended to provide places for 700 persons. Inevitably, with the advent of the Great Famine in 1845, that figure was greatly exceeded; by the end of the famine period, there were four times as many occupants, this severe overcrowding leading to many deaths from diseases such as typhus. A graveyard was opened in August 1847 to provide burial sites for those who had died in the workhouse. Subsequently additions were made to the site, with a long, two-storey wing running behind the austere three-storey entrance/admissions block, the former concluding in a chapel, constructed in 1871. 





By the start of the present century, much of the former workhouse in Tipperary had fallen into  disrepair, although part of it had been converted into commercial premises (and this remains the case today). In 2000, the Tipperary hostel project, a community-based project, embarked on the transformation of the building into self-catering accommodation for tourists. The project successfully secured support and finance from a number of agencies, most notably FÁS, a state-funded training agency intended to encourage employment. Upon completion, the facility was expected to operate primarily as a local community-based hostel under community and voluntary management. The income generated from this enterprise was expected to finance further educational and training work in the fields of traditional trades and crafts, not least by hosting residential workshops. However, while the project was supposed to be completed in four or five years, in 2010 it transpired that while almost €4 million had been provided in state funding, the job remained unfinished and further finance had been suspended. Three years later, in December 2013, the Irish Independent reported that a police investigation had been launched into ‘how a derelict pre-famine workhouse, which was to be refurbished into a modern hostel in a Fas-run project, remains rundown despite almost €5m of public funds being spent on the project’, with only room on the site completed. Furthermore, ‘several of the 23 workers who were supposed to be working on the site of the former workhouse ended up working in 62 other locations, including local GAA and tennis clubs as well as community halls and other local amenities. Twenty private dwellings were also renovated.’ Work on the project had already been halted and was not resumed.





Following this debacle, responsibility for the Tipperary workhouse passed to the local authority, which appears to have done nothing to ensure the building’s future or to secure it against incursion: in March 2018 the site suffered a bad arson attack which left large sections of the roof exposed to the elements, but no repairs were undertaken, leading to further deterioration. Meanwhile, most of the windows were broken and also left unrepaired. Then in February 2019 it emerged that the county council was attempting to sell the workhouse, although it seems there were no offers made for the place, or at least none sufficiently satisfactory for the place to change hands. Instead, it was left to fall into the present condition. This is how the workhouse now looks, abandoned and neglected, with little evidence that just over 20 years ago the plan was that it would become an important tourist asset for Tipperary, bringing visitors to the area, providing employment for residents, improving the local economy. Instead, it has become another broken-down building, an eyesore instead of an asset. This isn’t an unusual story in Ireland. Indeed, there’s hardly a town around the country that doesn’t have a substantial property, too often owned by either a national or local authority, or a state body, which has enormous potential but has been allowed to fall into a ruinous condition. Once again, this is how we choose to treat our architectural heritage. 

Tripartite


The so-called abbey in Mungret, County Limerick. There had been a monastery here, supposedly founded in the mid-sixth century by Saint Nessan, but due to frequent assault and despoliation over subsequent centuries, no trace of the original buildings survives.  Instead, what can be found here dates back to the 12th and 13th centuries. In 1179 Donal Mór O Brien, King of Leinster granted the monastery and its lands to the Bishop of Limerick, and this subsequently became a parish church for Augustinian Canons Regular. The building is divided into three sections, the oldest part at the east end being the chancel, followed by the nave and then, at the west end, a square tower added in the 15th century and incorporating living quarters for a priest. Following the 16th century Reformation, the building continued to be used by the Church of Ireland until replaced by a new church designed by the Pain brothers in 1822 and located a short distance to the west of the older structure. The Pains’ work  – which took the form of a Greek cross – did not survive long, since falling numbers of parishioners meant the new church at Mungret closed just 55 years later in 1877, before being unroofed in 1900, with much of the stone then reused to build a parochial house in nearby Raheen. 


New Ruins


‘New ruins have not yet acquired the weathered patina of age, the true rust of the barons’ wars, not yet put on their ivy, nor equipped themselves with the appropriate bestiary of lizards, bats, screech-owls, serpents, speckled toads and little foxes which, as has been so frequently observed by ruin-explorers, hold high revel in the precincts of old ruins (such revelling, though noted with pleasure, is seldom described in detail; possibly the jackal waltzes with the toad, the lizard with the fox, while the screech-owl supplies the music and they all glory and drink deep among the tumbled capitals)…’





‘…But new ruins are for a time stark and bare, vegetationless and creatureless; blackened and torn, they smell of fire and mortality. It will not be for long. Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon the ruin will be enjungled, engulfed, and the appropriate creatures will revel. Even ruins in city streets will, if they are let alone, come, soon or late, to the same fate. Month by month it grows harder to trace the streets around them; here, we see, is the lane of tangled briars that was a street of warehouses; there, in those jungled caverns, stood the large tailor’s shop; where those grassy paths cross, a board swings, bearing the name of a tavern. We stumble among stone foundations and fragments of cellar walls, among the ghosts of the exiled merchants and publicans who there carried on their gainful trades. Shells of churches gape emptily; over broken altars the small yellow dandelions make their pattern. All this will presently be; but at first there is only the ruin; a mass of torn, charred prayer books strew the stone floor; the statues, tumbled from their niches, have broken in pieces; rafters and rubble pile knee-deep…’





‘…But often the ruin has put on, in its catastrophic tipsy chaos, a bizarre new charm* What was last week a drab little house has become a steep flight of stairs winding up in the open between gaily-coloured walls, tiled lavatories, interiors bright and intimate like a Dutch picture or a stage set; the stairway climbs up and up, undaunted, to the roofless summit where it meets the sky. The house has put on melodrama; people stop to stare; here is a domestic scene wide open for all to enjoy. To-morrow or to-night, the gazers feel, their own dwelling may be even as this. Last night the house was scenic; flames leaping to the sky; to-day it is squalid and morne, but out of its dereliction it flaunts the flags of what is left.’


Extracts from Pleasure of Ruins by Rose Macaulay (1953). Photographs show Ballymorris, County Laois, a house believed to date from c.1760 and which appears to have been occupied until some 15 years ago but has since fallen into its present sad condition. 

 

Unmissable



One of Dublin’s best-known – and most visible – public monuments: the Wellington Testimonial in the Phoenix Park. Originally conceived in 1813 (in other words, two years before the Battle of Waterlook), this enormous obelisk faced in granite ashlar measures 220 feet from base to apex and is 120 feet square at the base. Designed by Sir Robert Smirke, funds of £20,000 for the monument were raised by public subscription. Work began in 1817 and was completed three years later, albeit without the three pedestal bas-reliefs. Finally unveiled in 1861, these represent, on the west, the 1799 Siege of Seringapatam (actually overseen by Wellington’s elder brother Richard Wellesley who was then Governor-General of India), on the south a celebration of the 1829 Catholic Emancipation (achieved while Wellington was Prime Minister) and on the north, the Battle of Waterloo. The east face carries a laudatory inscription to Wellington in Latin and English. The original intention was for an equestrian statue of the duke flanked by guardian lions to be placed in front of this side of the monument, but although the pedestals were erected, the figures never materialised.


A Melancholy Centenary

Ardfert Abbey

Last weekend marked the centenary of the final burning of a big house in County Kerry during the War of Independence/Civil War period, the property in question being Ballycarty, which lay to the south-west of Tralee and had been occupied by the Nash family since the third quarter of the 18th century. In total, 15 such houses in the county were destroyed during the period 1920-23, a list of these appearing in the recently published The Big House in Kerry: A Social History edited by Jane O’Hea O’Keeffe. Amid the 18 properties examined in individual chapters by different authors, four of them are among those lost at the time: Kilmorna (burnt April 1921 and its occupant Sir Arthur Vicars killed), Ballyheigue Castle (burnt May 1921, see Particularly Commodious « The Irish Aesthete), Ardfert Abbey (burnt August 1922) and Derryquin (burnt August 1922). 

Glenbeigh Castle


Ballyheigue Castle

In a fascinating chapter at the start of The Big House in Kerry, historian John Knightly looks at ‘The Destruction of the Big House in Kerry 1920-23’ and the various reasons for these properties being burnt. He proposes that the destruction of two houses was due to suspicions that they might be used by British forces, seven were burnt as a result of land agitation, and six the consequence of looting. It is clear that in the aftermath of the First World War and the economic depression that followed, a large number of agricultural workers found themselves in dire circumstances, leading to agrarian unrest. Initially much of this took place in north Kerry with attacks made on large farms, popularly known as ‘ranches.’ The persons involved sought for these land holdings to be broken up and divided into small parcels for distribution among the local populace. By this time, taking advantage of schemes such as the 1903 Wyndham Act, many estate owners had sold the greater part of their land and only held onto the immediate demesne. Some owners, in the face of threatened or actual attacks on their property, sought to sell up and leave, although given the real or incipient violence, purchasers were not easy to find. A number of owners simply decided to leave. In north Kerry, Rose Trent-Stoughton, last owner of Ballyhorgan, who had already sold much of the estate under the terms of the Wyndham Act, organised for the house’s contents to be auctioned in April 1919. Since she, by then an elderly woman, was living in England, the building was vulnerable to theft: in March 1920 two men were charged at Listowel District Court for removing boards, door frames and a gate from Ballyhorgan. Two months later, the house, dating from the 1750s, was set alight and left a shell: the first of such arson attacks in Kerry. The remains were later demolished and nothing now remains. Glenbeigh Castle, otherwise known as Winn Towers, was next: like Ballyhorgan, it was unoccupied but in this case rumours had spread that the building was due to be taken over by a British regiment. Having stood empty for some time, the castle, designed by Edward Godwin in the 1860s, did not burn easily. The leader of those responsible for its destruction later wrote ‘after sprinkling twelve tins of petrol over the floors, it refused to light, and at dawn I was faced with a problem. It was damp, old and much of it stonework. I noted a lot of shrub nearby, and sent the men to collect and fill up one room with it…’ And so it went on, often in waves, with a series of attacks in spring 1920, another during the same period the following year, a third in summer/autumn 1922 and then, closing the sequence, Ballycarty in January 1923. 


Ardtully


Flesk Castle

It is important to note that while their destruction should be lamented, only 15 Kerry country houses were burnt in the years 1920-23. In another, introductory chapter, John Knightly observes that at the start of the last century there were some 115 properties in the county. These varied in size and age, and the amount of land holdings differed considerably. Three families – the Petty-FitzMaurices, Brownes and de Moleyns – owned estates running to almost 100,000 each, but others might have a few hundred acres. Inevitably, most of them were members of the Church of Ireland but a few, not least the Earl of Kenmare, were Roman Catholic: interestingly in 1913/14 the local president of the Irish Unionist Alliance – formed to oppose home rule – was the aforementioned Lord Kenmare. Knightly estimates that out of a county population of 160,000 in 1911, perhaps between 700 and 1,000 were members of this landed elite. The situation soon began to change, the burnings of 1920-23 being just one factor in this transformation. As Knighty comments, ‘Ultimately, the Land Commission and the Irish State were responsible for more big houses than the War of Independence and Civil War combined. The process begun in 1879 at the start of the Land War was thus completed over 100 years later. High taxes, high rates and falling incomes did the rest.’ Typical in this respect is Flesk Castle, abandoned in the 1940s (although now happily being brought back to use). Knightly notes that today only four Kerry houses remain in the hands of the family responsible for their construction. But others happily survive, such as Beaufort (subject of a chapter by Donald Cameron), a picture of which can be seen below.

Beaufort House

The Big House in Kerry: A Social History, edited by Jane O’Hea O’Keeffe is published by Irish Life and Lore (€39.00)

The Real Thing



After last Monday’s fake castle, here is the real thing. Now situated on the north bank of the Grand Canal (which would not have existed at the time of its construction), this is the four-storey Srah Castle, County Offaly which dates from 1588 when built by Andrew Briscoe and his wife Eleanor Kearney. As was typical of tower houses of the period, it has a battered base, machiolation directly above the single, round-headed entrance, a series of gun-loops and a bartizan on the south-west corner (its match on the north-east has since collapsed, leaving a large hole in the structure). To the immediate west are the remains of a large hall, of which little other than one gable end survives. Seemingly the castle was badly damaged during the Confederate Wars and never recovered, the Briscoes moving elsewhere in the county.


Wrapped in Mystery


Despite Ireland being a relatively small country, it can often be difficult to discover information about many of our historic buildings, the precise details of their origin and development lost to local fable. Such is the case with Gortkelly Castle, County Tipperary, about which surprisingly little is known. Samuel Lewis, for example, did not include the place in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) nor, more than a century later, does it appear in Mark Bence-Jones’s Guide to Irish country houses (1978), or indeed in any other relevant publication. Yet this is hardly a modest cottage, so the absence of documentation is strange, although by no means unusual. 





It appears that for at least two centuries, Gortkelly was home to a branch of the Ryan family. In 1746 John Ryan received a lease for 31 years of the land on which the house stands. The lease was given by one Daniel Ryan: despite the same surname, the two men are not thought to have been related. Based at Inch, a few miles to the east of Gortkelly, Daniel Ryan was that relatively rare individual in the mid-18th century: a Roman Catholic who had held onto a large estate. Six years before granting the lease, he had employed John Ryan as an agent, to oversee the management of his property, collect rent from other tenants and so forth. Presumably John Ryan had proven competent in the position, and this explains why he was leased several hundred acres at Gortkelly. The lease was renewed in 1781 to Andrew Ryan and then in 1814 to John Ryan. In the 1870s, another Andrew Ryan of Gortkelly Castle, Borrisoleigh, owned 906 acres in County Tipperary. This estate was advertised for sale in December 1877 but the family seems to have remained in residence, since one Patrick Ryan is listed as dying there in 1937. 





As already mentioned, almost no information exists about the building now known as Gortkelly Castle. www.buildingsofireland.ie proposes that the core of the house dates from c.1800 with alterations made to its external appearance some 30 years later. However, given that John Ryan received his lease on the land here in 1746, the original construction date could be earlier. On high ground facing almost due east, the building clearly began as a classical house of five bays and three storeys; an extensive range of outbuildings, presumably from the same period, still stand to the immediate south. From what remains of the interior, it appears there were four reception rooms on the ground floor, with the central space to the rear occupied by a staircase hall lit by a tall arched window on the return. At some subsequent period, the decision was taken to modify the exterior – of rubble limestone – so as to give the house the appearance, if only superficially, of a castle. Accordingly, a crenellated parapet was added to the front and side elevations, slender octagonal towers placed on corners of the facade, and the entrance dressed up with a projecting polygonal tower climbing above the roofline to a belvedere which must have offered wonderful views across the surrounding countryside. These elements are of brick, the whole building then rendered and scored to look as though of dressed stone. These decorative flourishes are so shallow that they must be early 19th century, certainly before the Gothic Revival movement demanded a more authentic historical approach. Whoever was responsible for this work is now unknown. Seemingly Gortkelly Castle was unroofed around 1940 (in other words, a few years after the death of Patrick Ryan) and then left to fall into the striking ruin that can be seen today, another part of Ireland’s architectural history wrapped in mystery.