Category Archives: Country House

A Peculiar Melancholy Air



As previously mentioned, George Moore’s 1886 series of essays Parnell and his Island describes a duck shoot that brings him and another man to the ruins of Castle Carra, County Mayo. After leaving that building, the pair walk on an come across ‘the ruins of what is almost a modern house; there is a vast courtyard, and in the centre a colossal stone fox, and farther away is the ruin of a great gateway, and on the hill stand colossal foxhounds.’ This was what remained of a residence built probably at the start of the 18th century by Sir Henry Lynch and then abandoned by his son Robert. There was an earlier mention of the same property in 1836 when the Rev. Richard Butler of Trim and his wife Harriet (née Edgeworth) together with Harriet’s sister Maria and step-mother Frances came to stay with George Moore’s grandparents at Moore Hall, located to the south east of Castle Carra. The went to see the latter site which ‘had that peculiar melancholy air of modern decay belonging to houses which have been abandoned within the memory of man, and on passing through it to the grounds beyond, the party were startled at seeing immense busts on pedestals still standing in the long grass, the remains of former decorations. Ben Johnson, Congreve and some other of the later dramatists of Charles II’s time, were here, presenting a strange grotesque appearance, stained and weather-beaten in this wild and remote corner of the world.’ Since the time of the Butlers, and indeed of George Moore, the busts, as well as the colossal stone fox and hounds, have long disappeared, and the remains disintegrated much further, so that it is even more challenging to imagine how this great house and its surroundings once appeared. The best surviving remnants are the two immense stone gateposts, rising some 17 or 18 feet high. The ‘peculiar melancholy air’ observed by Harriet Butler also continues to hang over the place.



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A Handsome House



‘Not far from Douglas is a handsome house adorned with a cupola and good plantations, the residence of Mr Richard Newenham, merchant in Cork, a gentleman who is the largest dealer in Ireland in the worsted trade, and employs some thousands in different parts of this country in spinning bay yarn, which he exports to Bristol.’ From The Ancient and Present State of the County and City of Cork by Charles Smith (1750).
The Newenhams are believed to have settled in Cork in the early 17th century and to have prospered as merchants: in 1671 one of their number, John Newenham, served as Mayor of Cork city. One branch of the family would come to live at Coolmore (see Trans-Atlantic Links « The Irish Aesthete). Believed to have been born around 1705, Richard Newenham was the son of another John, a clothier who some years earlier had become a Quaker. His father-in-law, Thomas Wight, who also began professional life as a clothier, was author of A history of the rise and progress of the people called Quakers, in Ireland, from the year 1653 to 1700. The eldest of seven children, Richard Newenham prospered and, as noted by Charles Smith, developed a thriving textile business. As Daniel Beaumont has noted, he may also have been involved in the manufacture of sailcloth, because the village of Douglas, close to Maryborough, had become an important centre for this industry. Newenham also went into partnership with a number of other men in the business of ‘sugar making and sugar boiling’ on the southern outskirts of Cork city. In 1738 he married Sarah Devonsher, member of another successful Quaker family which was responsible for building Kilshannig (see Exuberance « The Irish Aesthete).





Probably built not long before Charles Smith published his book on Cork in 1750 and thought to be on the site of an earlier house, Maryborough was then described as having a cupola, but that no longer exists. The main body of the house is rendered, of three storeys over a raised basement, and seven bays wide, the three-bay breakfront defined with limestone quoins. A substantial flight of steps leads up to the pedimented entrance doorcase, also of limestone. The rear of the house is similar, having a three-bay breakfront but with a Gibbsian doorcase and the two upper floors being slate-fronted, as is the upper section of an extension to the east. The latter’s two-storied facade is a substantial, three-bay bow. This part of the building is thought to be a later extension from c.1830 while behind it is another addition from the late 18th century, a gable-ended wing accommodating a cantilevered Portland stone staircase: Frank Keohane proposes this as the work of local architect Michael Shanahan (who also worked in Ulster for the Earl-Bishop of Derry). The interiors of Maryborough are relatively plain, as befitted the home of a member of the Quaker community, amongst whom there was strong disapproval of gratuitous ornament. However, one room on the first floor has an elaborately decorated rococo ceiling, heavily enriched with scrolling acanthus leaves and an abundance of floral bouquets. 





Following Richard Newenham’s death in 1759, Maryborough was inherited by his only son John, and after the latter died in turn his son, another Richard, inherited the property. In 1837 it was described by Samuel Lewis as ‘the residence of E.E. Newenham Esq., a noble mansion in a spacious demesne, embellished with stately timber.’
Maryborough remained in the ownership of the Newenhams until the late 19th century, although rented out for some years before being sold to Thomas Sherrard in 1889. His descendants lived there until 1995 when the place was sold to the present owners who turned the house into an hotel, with a large bedroom extension added to the south and, more recently, an orangery/function room to the immediate west of the old building.


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In Need of an Overhaul



Born in Cheshire in 1689, Robert Taylor was a younger son of Sir Thomas Taylor, first baronet. The latter’s father, also called Thomas Taylor, had come to Ireland in 1652 to work as Chief Surveyor and Examiner on the Down Survey with an annual stipend of £100. In the aftermath of this enterprise, Taylor sold his own family lands in Sussex and bought 21,000 acres in County Meath. His descendants, who eventually became Marquesses of Headfort, continued to live there until the last century, their main residence Headfort now serving as a preparatory school (see A Unique Legacy « The Irish Aesthete). Meanwhile, as a younger son Robert Taylor could not expect to inherit the family property and so studied for Holy Orders at Trinity College Dublin. In 1714, he was appointed Archdeacon of Kilmacduagh in the Province of Tuam, likely through the influence of his brother-in-law William Fitzgerald, Bishop of Clonfert and Kilmacduagh. Eight years later, Taylor became Precentor of Clonfert, and then in 1726 made Dean of the same diocese, although he seems to have resigned from the position soon afterwards. Some years earlier, he had bought a parcel of land between Skerries and Balbriggan in North County Dublin. When his only sister died in 1726, she left him 544 acres in County Galway and £800. More than a decade later, Taylor used this bequest to purchase the townlands of Ardgilland and Baltry, adjacent to the property he had already acquired north of the capital. Here he built a modest country residence for himself of three bays and two storeys-over-basement. Although the area had originally been called Ardgillan (from the Irish Ard Choill, meaning High Wood), its location on raised ground overlooking the Irish Sea meant that it had come to be known as Mount Prospect. For this reason, the new property was given the name Prospect House. In what later became a billiard room can be seen a white marble plaque carrying an engraving in Latin which can be translated as follows:
‘With the Lord’s Favour, Robert Taylor, Dean of Clonfert, built this house in the year of Salvation 1738.
May mendacity, quarreling, shouting, grief and anger be far from here.
Let sweet friendship, calm, soulful happiness, naked truth, and play be present.
So we say in the morning and again when the sun sinks beneath the ocean.’
(This last line taken from Horace’s Odes, Book 4, Verse 5)





The Reverend Robert Taylor died unmarried in 1744 and the Prospect estate was inherited by his elder brother, another Sir Thomas Taylor. In due course the property passed to the latter’s heir, Sir Thomas Taylour (note the change in the spelling of the family’s surname), who in 1766 was created first Earl of Bective. In 1783, Prospect was described by the English antiquary Austin Cooper as ‘a country seat of Lord Bective’s.’ A few years later, in 1786, plans were drawn up by one Henry Brownrigg for alterations to Prospect House. While remaining two storeys’ high, Brownrigg’s proposals would effectively have doubled the building’s size, with the addition of a new drawing room, dining room, a parlour, a ‘court’ and a ‘great stairs.’ However, the scheme remained unexecuted and following the earl’s death in 1795, Prospect, along with the rest of the Taylour estates, was inherited by his eldest son, yet another Thomas Taylour who would be created first Marquess of Headfort five years later. Before then, he leased Prospect to one of his younger brothers, Clotworthy Taylour, the latter’s first name deriving from his mother’s family. That union was made even closer when he married a cousin, Frances Rowley, only child of the Hon. Major Clotworthy Rowley and heiress to the Summerhill estate in County Meath (see My Name is Ozymandias « The Irish Aesthete), which in turn led him to change his own name to Clotworthy Rowley. In 1800, he became first Baron Langford of Summerhill. Incidentally, one of Clotworthy Rowley’s siblings was General Hon. Robert Taylour who, in his retirement lived at Dowdstown, County Meath (see Dowdstown « The Irish Aesthete). Meanwhile, Prospect House became available to the youngest son of that generation, the Hon Henry Edward Taylor who, like his great-uncle Robert, was a Church of Ireland clergyman. However, unlike the late Dean of Clonfert, the Rev Edward Taylour was married, his wife being Marianne Harriet St Leger, a granddaughter of the first Viscount Doneraile. The couple came to live at Prospect in 1807 and the following decade saw substantial changes made to the structure building. 





A map dating from 1844 shows Prospect now renamed Ardgillan Castle, the house having been given castellations and single-storey, three-bay battlemented wings on either side of the entrance front. These accommodated a new drawing and dining room.  The same year also saw the opening of a railway line from Dublin to Drogheda which passed through the eastern boundary of the estate: the Taylors gave permission for this on several conditions, one of which was that trains would stop for them on their property if they so wished. Following the death of the Rev Edward Taylorin 1852 and then his wife Marianne seven years later , Ardgillen was initially inherited by the couple’s younger surviving son General Sir Richard Chambre Hayes Taylor, his elder brother Captain Thomas Edward Taylor having inherited the Dowdstown estate from their unmarried uncle, General Hon. Robert Taylor. However, the siblings agreed to swap properties, meaning Thomas Edward Taylor lived at Ardgillen.  A Conservative MP for County Dublin from 1841 to 1883, he became Chief Government Whip in 1866 and later Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and a member of the Queen’s Privy Council. To designs by architect Sandham Symes, further alterations were made to the house in 1863 with the addition of two castellated towers, one containing a smoking room, the other storage rooms. Thomas Edward Taylor had married the previous year, and he and his wife Louisa Tollemache would go on to have five children. The eldest of these, Captain Edward Richard Taylor, inherited Ardgillan following his father’s death in 1883 and left his own mark on the house by installing oak panelling in the dining room (the doors carved with the date 1889) and shelving in the library. He only married in 1935, shortly before his 70th birthday, and left no immediate heir when he died three years later. The Ardgillan estate, much reduced following sales of land over the preceding decades, was now inherited by his nephew Richard Taylor, a barrister who had hitherto been living and working in Singapore with his family. The Taylors returned to Europe and lived in Ardgillan but found it increasingly difficult to make the place pay for itself. In 1958, they sold a large Kilkenny marble chimneypiece from the house to the Hon Desmond Guinness: today it can be seen in the entrance hall of Leixlip Castle. Four years later, the entire estate was sold to a German industrialist, Heinrich Pott, and members of his family held onto the place until 1981 when it was placed on the market, the eventual purchaser being the local authority, now Fingal County Council. Ardgillan Castle and its demesne are open to the public, with plenty of walking trails around the grounds and much attention paid to maintenance of the formal and walled gardens. As for the house itself, while work was undertaken on conserving the fabric some 40 years ago, today the place looks tired and its meanly furnished interiors in need of some attention. The same authority is also responsible for two other historic properties – Malahide Castle and Newbridge both of which have benefitted in recent years from generous care and improvement. It’s time for Ardgillan Castle to enjoy the same treatment and be given an overhaul.


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Uncertain Future II



After Monday’s text about Mount Melleray Abbey, County Waterford, here is another historic property with an uncertain future. The Tudorbethan Bangor Castle, County Down dates from c.1847 when commissioned by Robert Edward Ward to replace an earlier house on the same site. There is some disagreement over who might have been the architect responsible, most authorities arguing in favour of William Burn, but both William Walker of Monaghan and Anthony Salvin have also been proposed: Charles Brett proposed that while the original concept was by Walker, Burn designed the main block and Salvin the somewhat different stable wing. Ward had only one child, Matilda who married the fifth Baron Clanmorris. Following her death in 1941, the building and 150 surrounding acres was sold to Bangor Borough Council for £35,000. After making some alterations to the building, including the removal of tall chimney-stacks, the authority moved into Bangor Castle in 1952 and have been there ever since. Last year, however, the council asked a consultancy firm to ‘explore viable options for the future use of Bangor Castle and develop a preferred option.’ A short list of five possible uses of the building was drawn up: a boutique hotel and events centre, a larger hotel and events centre, a creative hub and cultural arts centre, a small business workspace, or a small business workspace and museum. In recent weeks the council has announced its intention to move out of the property to new premises and to find a new purpose for Bangor Castle.



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Memories

Herewith some memories of visits paid to various sites around Ireland during 2024:

The Argory, County Armagh (Where Time Stands Still « The Irish Aesthete)

Riverstown, County Cork (Rescued from Ruin « The Irish Aesthete)

Lucan House, County Dublin (Addio del Passato « The Irish Aesthete)

Former House of Lords, Bank of Ireland, Dublin (Where Turkeys Voted for Christmas « The Irish Aesthete)

Ardress, County Armagh (theirishaesthete.com/2024/06/10/ardress/)

Corbalton, County Meath (Corbalton « The Irish Aesthete)

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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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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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Visionary



After Monday’s melancholic post about the former bishop’s palace in Clonfert, here is a more cheering story. More than eight years ago, in May 2016, the Irish Aesthete was taken to see a house called Solsborough in County Tipperary. Dating from the first half of the 19th century, although likely on the site of an older property, the place had long since been unroofed and abandoned, and like so many other buildings of its kind, left a shell on the landscape. But in 2014 Solsborough was bought by the present owners who gradually embarked on an ambitious and thorough restoration programme: as can be seen in the photographs above, this was only beginning to get underway at the time of the 2016. Today the house has been fully and wonderfully brought back to use, a further demonstration that no such building is beyond salvation – and re-use – provided there is sufficient vision on the part of those responsible.


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Seventy Years Ago…


The charming cathedral dedicated to St Brendan in Clonfert, County Galway has featured here before (see The Traveller’s Rest « The Irish Aesthete). And because Clonfert was, until the 1833, a separate diocese in the Church of Ireland (it remains so in the Roman Catholic church), there was also an episcopal palace, now alas a sad ruin. Standing a short distance to the north of the cathedral, the oldest part of this building is thought to date back to the late 16th or early 17th century, possibly constructed during the episcopacy of Stephen Kirwan (bishop of Clonfert 1682-1701) who served as a justice and commissioner for the province of Connaught. There is no doubt that Clonfert, today a sleepy hamlet, was then judged a place of some importance since in 1579, Elizabeth I, in her Orders to be observed by Sir Nicholas Maltby for the better government of the province of Connaught’ declared ‘We are desirous that a college should be erected in the nature of an university in some convenient place in Ireland for instructing and education of youth in lerninge. And We conceive the Town of Clonfert within the province of Connaught to be aptlie seated both for helth and comodity of the ryver of Shenen running by it and because it is also neere to the midle of the realme, whereby all men may, with small travel send their children thither.’ The queen may have heard that during a much earlier period, Clonfert had been a great seat of learning, or perhaps it was just that the cathedral and its ancillary buildings were located in a central location and, as she observed, close to the river Shannon, then a major means of travel through Ireland. However, the idea of establishing a college here never happened, and it was only in 1592 that the country’s first university was founded in Dublin.





As mentioned, while parts of the former bishop’s palace in Clonfert may go back to the late 16th century, a more substantial portion of the building dates from c.1635, during the episcopacy of Robert Dawson, who had become Bishop of the newly-united dioceses of Clonfert and Kilmacduagh in 1627 and would hold that position until his death in 1643 (incidentally, he was also the forebear of a family that would go on to become great landowners and developers in Ireland, not least his great-grandson Joshua Dawson who was responsible for laying out Dawson Street in Dublin and building what is now the Mansion House). Oak beams and roof joists in the palace have been dated to around this period, although further changes and additions were made at some time in the 18th century, when a Venetian window was inserted.
In his memoirs, published in 1805, the playwright Richard Cumberland wrote about the palace in Clonfert, which he knew well since his father Denison Cumberland had lived there while bishop of the diocese (1763-1772). ‘This humble residence,’ he recalled, ‘was not devoid of comfort and convenience, for it contained some tolerable lodging rooms, and was capacious enough to receive me and mine without straitening the family. A garden of seven acres, well planted and disposed into pleasant walks, kept in the neatest order, was attached to the house, and at the extremity of a broad gravel walk in front stood the cathedral.’ Cumberland also remembered how, while staying with his father on one occasion, he used ‘a little closet at the back of the palace, as it was called, unfurnished and out of use, with no other prospect from my single window but that of a turf-stack’, as a room in which to begin writing what would prove to be his most successful stage work, the comedy The West-Indian (first performed at London’s Drury Lane Theatre in 1771). However, Clonfert was always one of the poorest episcopacies in the country and as a result successive bishops – many of whom managed to have themselves transferred to richer dioceses after only a short period of time – were disinclined to make improvements to their residence. For this reason, it retained much of its 17th century character, being long and low, of eight bays and two storeys with dormer windows. The surrounding demesne also underwent relatively few changes. There survives, for example, a yew walk running south-west of the palace, which may be even older, but certainly has the character of 17th century baroque garden design. Like the building to which it leads, the yew walk is now sadly neglected.




Clonfert Palace remained home to successive Church of Ireland bishops until 1834 when, following the creation of a new united diocese of Killaloe and Clonfert, it became surplus to requirements and was sold to John Eyre Trench. In 1947 his descendants sold the building to the Blake-Kelly family who, four years later, sold it to the next owners who would be the last people to live in the former palace. By then the place was in poor condition and required extensive renovation, along with the installation of electricity, new bathrooms and so forth before it could be occupied; the new chatelaine drove over from her temporary residence in Co Tipperary to oversee this work. Finally, once complete, in February 1952 she and her family arrived, along with a retinue that included housekeeper, cook, maid and chauffeur, as well as a gardener to maintain the grounds. A local newspaper, the Westmeath Independent, reported that ‘‘Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley, who have a large staff, are charmed with Ireland, its people, the tempo of its life and its scenery.’ The same publication also briefly noted that ‘Sir Oswald was the former leader of a political movement in England.’ The ‘political movement’ had, of course, been the British Union of Fascists (later the British Union) and both Sir Oswald and his wife, the former Diana Mitford, had been interned for a number of years during the second World War by the British government, and had found themselves shunned in the aftermath of their release. Ireland had several advantages, not least the fact that two of Diana Mosley’s sisters already owned properties in the country, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire at Lismore Castle, County Waterford and Pamela Jackson at Tullamaine Castle, County Tipperary. Country houses here were going cheap, and there were still sufficient other landed families still about to make life agreeable to the newly-arrived. For the next two years, the Mosleys remained contentedly at Clonfert, attracting little attention although they were discreetly observed by both the Irish and British governments. Such might have remained the case, had not disaster struck exactly 70 years ago, in early December 1954. At the time, Diana Mosley was in London, but her husband and their two children were in County Galway when fire broke out, seemingly caused by an old beam inside the chimney of the maids’ sitting room. The blaze spread quickly, so fast indeed that according to a report in the following day’s Irish Times, a French maid, Mademoiselle Cerrecoundo, who had run upstairs to rescue some clothes, became trapped in the building. Sir Oswald, his son Alexander and the chauffeur, Monsieur Thevenon, held a blanket beneath one of the windows and the maid leapt to her safety, with only minor injuries to her back and hand. Alas, the old palace was not so lucky and while a handful of rooms and their contents were saved, most of the building was lost as it took an hour and a half for fire brigades to reach Clonfert. The following day, hurricane-force winds and torrential rain ripped across the entire country, compounding the damage done to the house and leaving it a sorry wreck. In 1955 the Mosleys moved to Ileclash, a Georgian overlooking the river Blackwater in County Cork where they lived intermittently until 1963 when the couple moved to France. As for Clonfert Palace, despite being described on www.buildingsofireland.com in 2009 as being of national significance, it was left to moulder into its present advanced state of decay. What could have been saved as a rare example of late 16th/early 17th century Irish domestic architecture has been lost.


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