Category Archives: Country House

New Purpose Sought


Last November, the Connacht Tribune reported there had been no expressions of interest in acquiring Garbally Court, a large early 19th century house on the outskirts of Ballinasloe, County Galway, even though it was being offered for just €1. More than two years earlier, the building’s present owner – the Roman Catholic Diocese of Clonfert – had offered to transfer Garbally Court along with some of the surrounding grounds to the authority for that nominal sum of a single euro. However, a commissioned Consultants’ Report had suggested expenditure of some €4.2 million would be needed just to stabilise the house and bring it up to a reasonable standard. While elected representatives of the area were keen for the acquisition to go ahead, in the hope that Garbally Court could be turned into a tourist attraction, thereby bringing business into the area, the County Council Executive’s advice to the group which needed to approve such matters prior to a full council meeting was that upgrading costs were prohibitive, even before running costs and possible future uses were taken into account. In November, the council’s director of services was quoted as advising councillors that the building ‘is not in our ownership and nor are we willing to take possession but the door is always open for anyone to come in and renovate the property for whatever purpose. But so far, nobody has come next nor near us.’ 




Garbally Court was built for Richard Le Poer Trench, second Earl of Clancarty. The Trenches claim descent from Frederic de La Tranche, his name supposedly derived from the family’s origins in the town of La Tranche in Poitou. Monsieur de La Tranche is believed to have left France as a result of religious persecution and settled in Northumberland in 1574. One of his sons, James Trench, a clergyman, settled in Ireland, becoming rector of Clongell, County Meath. His only child, Anna, married her first cousin Frederick Trench; it appears that he was responsible for initially buying the land in East Galway that formed the basis of the Garbally estate. The couple’s son, another Frederick, continued to acquire more land, especially in the aftermath of the Williamite Wars. In the next generation. Richard Trench married an heiress, Frances Power, in 1732; she brought further wealth and property to the family. Their eldest son, William Trench sat in the Irish House of Commons like his father before him, before being created first Baron Kilconnel (1797), then Viscount Dunlo (1801) and finally Earl of Clancarty (1803). He and his wife Anne Gardiner had no less than 19 children, their eldest son Richard succeeding to the titles and estates on his father’s death in 1805. The second earl was a politician and diplomat of considerable ability. After sitting in the Irish House of Commons until the dissolution of the Irish Parliament in 1800, and then in the English House of Commons until he became a member of the peerage, after which he sat at Westminster as an Irish representative peer. Close friendship with Castlereagh meant that after the latter became foreign secretary in 1812, the earl was entrusted with a succession of crucial diplomatic missions, attending the Congress of Vienna with the rank of plenipotentiary. He served twice as Britain’s ambassador to the Netherlands, that country’s king making him Marquis of Heusden in 1818; following his retirement as ambassador, he was also created Viscount Clancarty in the English peerage in 1823. But thereafter, and following Castlereagh’s death, he largely withdrew from political life and turned his attention to life in County Galway, where work was well underway on building Garbally Court. 




As mentioned, the present Garbally Court dates from the early 19th century. Its predecessor on the site had been badly damaged by fire in 1798, but it would be more than 20 years before work on a new house began. In 1819 the second earl commissioned designs from English architect Thomas Cundy, best-known for acting as surveyor of the Grosvenor family’s London estates and being involved in the initial development of Belgravia in the years prior to his death in 1825. Garbally Court is Cundy’s only work in Ireland, although he did design a number of lodges in various architectural styles for Coolmore, County Cork (see Trans-Atlantic Links « The Irish Aesthete) none of which were actually built. The architect, like others at the time, produced work in whatever style best suited his client. Hawarden Castle in Wales, for example, is – as its name indicates – in the Gothic manner, but Garbally Court is austerely neoclassical. Square in plan, the house is of two storeys and eleven bays, the entrance front relieved by a single-storey Doric porte-cochère, while the rear elevation has a single storey, three-bay bow. Regular and segmental pediments alternate over the ground floor windows. Originally the house was constructed around a central open courtyard but this was later covered and made into a picture gallery. The earl’s descendants continued to own Garbally Court until 1921 when, along with the surrounding demesne, it was sold to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Clonfert for £6,750. The following year the diocesan boys’ school, St. Joseph’s College, moved to the site and constructed classrooms and other ancillary buildings close to the house. A boarding school was run here until 2008 when it closed down and since then a new school has also been built, hence the need to find fresh purpose – and a new owner – for Garbally Court. What both might look like remains to be seen.

Where Time Stands Still



When Joshua MacGeough died in 1817, he left Drumsill House, County Armagh to his younger son Walter, but with the provision that his three daughters took precedence in occupying the property until they either married, died or moved elsewhere. In the event, none of the trio married (and the last of them lived until 1861), so Walter, who would change his surname to MacGeough Bond, decided to build a new residence for himself on land owned by the family elsewhere in the county. In 1819, he commissioned designs for a house from siblings John and Arthur Williamson; they were related by marriage to Francis Johnston and John had also worked for a time in Johnston’s office as a drawing clerk. Nevertheless, the house the brothers produced shows little of Johnston’s influence. Faced in Caledon sandstone, The Argory is long and low, a two-storey, seven bay building, the east front almost entirely plain except for a porch added a few years after the main building had been completed. The west-facing facade is more elaborate, with a central, two-stepped breakfront, the upper portion of which has a horned pediment, the lower distinguished by fluted Doric columns supporting an entablature. Below this a wide elliptical arch has a lion’s head serving as the keystone, its extended tongue taking the form of an acanthus leaf. The main block of The Argory had barely been completed in 1824 before work started on a service wing on the building’s north side (the house has no basement). Behind this wing are a series of enclosed yards. 






The interiors of The Argory, County Armagh appear to have changed little if at all over the past century or more, retaining much of their late-19th century decoration and furnishings: it is as though time has stood still. In standard tripartite fashion, on either side of the entrance hall lie the drawing  and dining rooms, both of which have elaborate overdoors added in the 1850s to the designs of Thomas Turner, those in the latter room featuring scallop shells filled with fruit. Similarly, both rooms have splendid white marble chimneypieces with carved centre panels, that in the drawing room depicting the Death of Cleopatra, while in the dining room Ceres can be seen reclining with her Horn of Plenty. To the rear of the house, what had originally been a morning room was subsequently converted into an inner hall, with a massive chimneypiece of black marble and, above the door leading to the front of the building, a plaster frieze depicting a battle between warriors and Amazons, its design derived from that found below the entablature on the Temple of Athena Nike in Athens. 






The bow-ended entrance hall of The Argory, County Armagh is dominated by a  cantilevered Portland stone staircase that snakes up to the first floor with brass balusters and mahogany handrail. The walls here are painted to imitate sheets of Siena marble while at the foot of the stairs is the original cast-iron stove of Greek pedestal design, topped by a copy of the Warwick Vase and installed in the house in the early 1820s. A wide landing on the first-floor accommodates a large cabinet organ, initially commissioned in 1822 from James Davis but following the latter’s retirement, the work passed to James Chapman Bishop who completed the instrument in 1824; it was thereafter played to accompany morning and evening prayers for the household. Although part of the original furnishings of The Argory, the organ’s dimensions meant cutting into the vaulted ceiling to accommodate it in this location. On either side of the landing, long corridors lead to a succession of bedrooms which, as elsewhere in the building, are still furnished in the style of the late 19th century. The Argory continued to be owned by the MacGeough Bond family until 1979 when it was presented to the National Trust. Last weekend, the trust celebrated the 200th anniversary of the house’s completion with a variety of events on the property.


Langrishe Go Down


The Langrishe family were originally from Hampshire, where they lived for several centuries until one of their number, Lieutenant Hercules Langrishe, arrived in Ireland c.1650. His father was the first of the family to be given that distinctive first name (his sibling was called Lucullus). The younger Hercules had one son, John, who married no less than five times, his second wife being Alice Blayney, daughter of Henry Blayney, second Baron Blayney. She had previously been married to one Thomas Sandford, who held a long lease on lands at Knocktopher, County Kilkenny; following her own death, the lease was inherited by John Langrishe and finally in 1757 his only child (from a third marriage) Robert Langrishe completed the outright purchase of the fee simple of this property. His son, another Hercules, created a baronet in 1777, served as MP for Knocktopher for almost 40 years until the Irish Parliament was abolished in consequence of the Act of Union in 1800. A keen advocate of Irish legislative independence, he was also a supporter of Roman Catholic Relief: in 1792 Edmund Burke published his renowned Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe arguing the necessity for all remaining civil restrictions on Catholics to be removed. Following Sir Hercules Langrishe’s death in 1811, the baronetcy and Knocktopher estate were inherited by his eldest son Robert.




The name Knocktopher derives from the Irish ‘Cnoc an Tóchair’, meaning the Hill of the Causeway. Seemingly, it first appears in surviving records from the late-13th century Ormond Deeds, associated with the Butlers. That family was critical in the development of the area, although a Norman motte and castle were already developed here by one Griffin FitzWilliam in the closing decades of the 12th century (a telling indication of public attitudes to the country’s heritage is the fact that the motte, along with some masonry, survived until 1973 when the site was completely levelled). In 1312 the Butlers took possession of Knocktopher, thereafter making it one of their principal residences; in consequence, an urban settlement grew up around the castle and eventually in 1365 Edward III gave permission for a weekly market to be held there. In the previous decade, James Butler, second Earl of Ormonde had founded a religious house in Knocktopher for Carmelite friars. They remained there until the Dissolution of the Monasteries and in 1542 their property was granted by the English government first to Sir Patrick Barnewall, Solicitor General for Ireland, and then passed to Sir Nicholas White, Master of the Rolls and Privy Councillor. His family retained Knocktopher until 1677 when it was bought by Sandsfords and, as mentioned above, through marriage it then passed into the possession of the Langrishes who remained there until 1981.




As seen today, Knocktopher Abbey primarily dates from 1866 when commissioned by Sir James Langrishe to replace an older property on the site which seemingly had been largely destroyed by fire some years earlier. The architect responsible was John McCurdy, today best-known for his remodelling of Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel. McCurdy’s output was eclectic: he also worked on the Museum Building in Trinity College Dublin and the Masonic Female Orphan School (now an hotel) in Ballsbridge, Dublin, as well as designing a number of private houses in diverse styles. At Knocktopher, evidently keen to emphasise the antiquity of the site, he opted for a loosely Gothic, asymmetrical manner, with suggestions of a French chateau, most notably in the three-storey entrance tower with Oriel window and steeply pitched roof. The building is faced in limestone ashlar, with granite used for door and lancet window dressings, the latter in bi- or tripartite arrangements. Further bipartite dormer windows are set into the roofline. What sets the house apart is that on the western side it incorporates parts of the medieval Carmelite priory, not least a great square tower of rough-hewn limestone and with window openings which may have been made by subsequent lay owners. Certainly a tall paired chimney stack suggests late 16th or early 17th century interventions and may hint at the appearance of the building lost to fire in the 19th century. But this must remain speculation, not least because access to the house’s interior was not possible. After being sold by the Langrishe family, Knocktopher Abbey was developed as a time share scheme. Today the service yard has been turned into a series of short-term self-catering units. A fascinating place that deserves closer study. 

A Charmer



Located on the outskirts of New Ross, County Wexford, Woodville dates from the first years of the 19th century and may have been built in 1807 when the property’s owner Edward Tottenham married Henrieta Alcock, daughter of Sir John Alcock; the Tottenhams had long been settled in this part of the country. Woodville’s site was clearly chosen because the land in front then drops away down to the river Barrow. However, this view was obscured in 1887 when the Dublin and South Eastern Railway opened a branch to New Ross, the line running along the banks of the river (the railway is long since closed). Of five bays and two storeys over basement, the house was originally two bays deep but was extended towards the end of the 19th century, with further alterations made during an extensive restoration in 2006. The Woodville estate was acquired by Patrick James Roche in 1876 and is still owned and occupied by his descendants who have developed charming and extensive gardens both in front and behind the main house. 


Period Piece


Back in 2010, while reviewing a biography of Derek Hill, the Irish Aesthete managed to affront a number of people by suggesting the artist’s reputation was less substantial than either he or his admirers might have wished. Indeed, some 24 years after his death, the question is likely to be asked in some circles: Derek who? Born in Southampton in 1916, after leaving school in 1933 Hill originally studied theatre design in Munich, before travelling eastwards through Russia, eventually visiting China and Japan. Returning to England, he took a job as costume designer at Sadlers Wells Theatre but then, encouraged by the couturier Edward Molyneux, he took up painting in a serious fashion. During the Second World War, he worked on a farm as a conscientious objector but still found time to paint and in 1943 had a one-man exhibition in London. In the aftermath of war, he spent a great deal of time in Italy, often staying with art historian Bernard Berenson at his villa I Tatti outside Florence. And he continued to paint, specialising in the genres of landscape and portraiture. Hill demonstrated a distinct aptitude for the former, especially when working on a small scale – in larger pictures he seemed to lose his way – and when presented with the kind of rugged prospect found in the north-west of Ireland, where he spent more and more time. The influence of Corot was always evident in this work, aligned with the beneficial impact of Cezanne. His portraits are more problematic, veering between acute character study and superficial likeness. Some of the finest are little more than preparatory studies; he could overwork a portrait and thereby mislay the sitter’s personality. But in their enormous number these pictures offer an insight into the scope of his social life, which took in everyone from Irish farmers to English grandees. That he had a weakness for aristocracy and royalty cannot be denied (he loved to go on painting holidays with Prince – now King – Charles); it was another aspect of his essentially old-fashioned persona. There is a well-known anecdote of Hill once being decried as a snob, to which he supposedly responded: “How amazing. I was only talking with the Queen Mother a few days ago, and she said just the same thing.” There were two drawbacks to his maintaining a busy social life, flitting from one grand house to the next: it made him appear trivial in the eyes of many people and it took him away from his work. Although he spent periods entirely focused on his work, and quoted Degas’ remark that “if the artist wishes to be serious . . . he must once more sink himself into solitude”, he was unable to apply this policy with sufficient rigour.






Derek Hill first came to Ireland in the late 1940s, invited here by the wealthy  Philadelphia-born socialite and art collector Henry McIllhenny who in 1938 had bought Glenveagh Castle, County Donegal, an estate some 15 miles south-west of where his forebears had lived until emigrating to the United States the previous century; at the time of their meeting, McIllhenny was working as Resident Art Historian at the American Academy in Rome. The two men thereafter remained lifelong ‘frenemies’ (to use a wonderful neologism) and in due course also neighbours because in 1953 Hill bought an old rectory, St Columb’s, just a few miles south of Glenveagh. Five years later, he visited Tory, a small island off the north coast of Donegal, where he rented a hut and spent time each summer painting for himself and also encouraging members of the local fishing community to do likewise, thereby creating a school of naïve painting, known as the Tory Island Painters, the best-known of whom was James Dixon. In 1982 Hill donated St Columb’s and its contents to the Irish State (McIllhenny had done likewise with Glenveagh Castle and gardens three years earlier) and thereafter lived in a small cottage nearby although he spent more time than hitherto in England. He died in London in 2000. 






St Columb’s dates from 1828 when, according to Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) it was constructed thanks to a gift of £400 and a loan of £380 from the Board of First Fruits; the surrounding glebe land ran to 25 acres. It remained in use as a Church of Ireland rectory until the death of the second resident clergyman, the Rev Henry Maturin in 1880, after which the building was leased to tenants before being sold. In 1898 it opened as St Columb’s Hotel, and continued to be used for this purpose until being bought by Derek Hill in 1953, the majority of guests over the intervening period coming to this part of the country either for fishing or shooting. Of two storeys and three bays, the house retains much of its original appearance, although a large and elaborate cast-iron single storey veranda to the rear seemingly was brought here from somewhere else. Inside, it has a typical tripartite design, with reception rooms on either side of a narrow entrance hall, that to the right presumably serving as a small study since the staircase immediately behind takes up considerable space. The decoration throughout is as it was when St Columb’s was occupied by Derek Hill and displays a fondness for Victoriana and William Morris papers, for needlepoint cushions and Staffordshire figures. The house is now a period piece, preserved as though its former owner had just stepped out for air, and deservedly ought to be kept as such even if, rather like Hill’s paintings, this will not be to everyone’s taste. It is open to the public for tours during the summer months, while, the adjacent yard buildings have been converted into a gallery space which hosts temporary exhibitions each year.

For more information about the house and gallery, see Glebe House and Gallery | Explore a world-class collection of art (glebegallery.ie)

 

Decidedly Quirky



Ardress House, County Armagh is a wonderfully quirky building that appears to have begun as a modest farmer’s residence but then, as we say in Ireland, ‘got notions.’ The earliest part, a gable-ended brick house of five bays over basement, probably dates from the late 17th century when constructed for one Thomas Clarke. In 1760 heiress Sarah Clarke married Dublin architect George Ensor who in due course enlarged Ardress by adding a further bay to either side of the east facade (and probably the small limestone Tuscan portico) and a large extension to the rear accommodating a grand drawing room. Within a few years of his death, further changes took place , the front enlarged by a further bay on either side with tripartite windows, their lower parapets decorated with urns and undulating dressed stone at each corner. The extension to the north contains rooms but that to the south is just a blank wall, as can be seen by going around to the garden where it becomes one of a pair of quadrants with blind recessed panels and statuary niches, the latter holding busts representing the Four Seasons. Formerly a conservatory ran the length of the five ground floor bays on this side, helping to provide some unity, but without this structure, the imbalance created by the double bays to the east is more apparent, thereby adding to Ardress House’s quirky charm.





Text here…The interiors of Ardress House, County Armagh are as idiosyncratic as its exterior. To the front of the building immediately inside the entrance is a large arch opening into a sitting room, while through a door on the other side lies a small parlour. The main staircase in an extension to the north rises to a landing which then divides to give access to bedrooms in different parts of the building. Meanwhile, another eccentric feature of Ardress House is the location of the dining room, which would customarily be located to one side of the entrance hall: here it is located behind the drawing room but not accessed from it. Instead, the dining room is reached via a corridor to the rear of the building and then through a small external door (originally a small glazed building provided coverage for diners).





As mentioned earlier, in 1760 heiress Sarah Clarke married architect George Ensor, who oversaw a number of additions to Ardress House, County Armagh. One of these was the creation c.1783 of a large, rectangular drawing room behind the original building, its walls and ceiling elaborately decorated with neoclassical plasterwork, its design attributed to the preeminent Irish stuccodore of the period, Michael Stapleton. The tripartite ceiling is composed of a circular section with demi-lunes on either side, the former containing a centrepieces featuring Aurora in a chariot drawn by two winged horses. Other panels and medallions around the walls show various classical figures, including Cupid bound to a tree and observed by three females and a warrior kneeling before Minerva and another goddess. Between these, garlands of husk chains and ribbons swoop and  fall across the walls in a breathtaking, and unexpected, display of sophisticated craftsmanship in rural Ulster. Ardress House is today under the care of the National Trust and open to the public. 


Addio del Passato



Last Monday, the Presidents of Ireland and Italy jointly inaugurated a new public park in Lucan, County Dublin, the space henceforth to be known as Parco Italia. The reason for this somewhat unusual name? Since 1942 Lucan House, which stands at the centre of the 30-acre park, has been the official residence of successive Italian ambassadors to this country. The building here has, like so often, a long and complex history but in its present form was commissioned in the early 1770s by the estate’s then-owner Agmondisham Vesey who, although he consulted several eminent architects, played an active role in the eventual design. Vesey’s house replaced an earlier one, probably dating back to the Middle Ages but much altered over the centuries. A painting by Thomas Roberts produced shortly before its demolition shows what appears to be a late-mediaeval tower house with a fortified manor house with castellated roofline to one side. Vesey’s wife Elizabeth, a noted bluestocking (and close friend of Elizabeth Montague) lamented the destruction of the older building, ‘with its niches and thousand other Gothic beauties,’ but her husband was determined to start afresh. To do this, he not only had to overcome his spouse’s opposition but also the original house’s associations with noted Irish patriot Patrick Sarsfield, first Earl of Lucan. His forebear, Sir William Sarsfield, had acquired the Lucan estate in 1566 and although temporarily dispossessed during the Confederate Wars, several generations of the family lived there until the marriage in 1696 of heiress Catherine Sarsfield (a niece of Patrick Sarsfield) to Agmondisham Vesey, father of the man responsible for building Lucan House. 





As mentioned above, Agmondisham Vesey, displayed a keen interest in architecture despite his involvement in many other activities: a Member of the Irish Parliament, he was also a Privy Councillor and Accountant and Controller General of Ireland. Like his wife Elizabeth he liked to keep abreast of cultural developments: in 1773, during the period that work was underway on the new house, he was elected to the ‘Club’, the informal dining and conversational group established by Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds 10 years earlier. Johnson and James Boswell granted him the notional title of ‘Professor of Architecture,’ and the latter wrote that Vesey had ‘left a good specimen of his knowledge and taste in that art by an elegant house built on a plan of his own at Lucan.’ Boswell exaggerated his friend’s role in the matter because while Vesey undoubtedly had a hand in Lucan House’s appearance, so did a number of architects, not least Sir William Chambers who in 1773 sent him now-lost ‘Designs for a Villa.’ It is thought that the facade of the building was based on this work, not least because in March 1774, Vesey wrote to Chambers, ‘I am much more intent in finishing the South front of your Plan at Lucan this summer.’ The aforementioned facade is of seven bays and two storeys over basement except for the breakfront three centre bays which feature an additional attic storey beneath a pediment (despite Vesey reminding Chambers ‘You have taught us to think pediments but common architecture). This central section is faced in granite ashlar with four half-engaged giant Ionic columns above a rusticated ground floor. Originally at that level the two bays on either side were given rusticated render, as can be seen in an engraving of the house produced by Thomas Milton in 1783, but this was removed at some later date. Lucan House’s design looks to have been the inspiration for Charleville, County Wicklow, designed by Whitmore Davis in 1797, although the facade of that building is entirely faced in ashlar and runs to nine bays. Meanwhile, at Lucan, the house forms a rectangular block, other than a three-bay bow to the rear that, as with the facade, rises three storeys over basement. 





If Sir William Chambers was involved in designing the exterior of Lucan House, James Wyatt, together with his Irish representative Thomas Penrose, can claim much credit for the building’s interiors, with Michael Stapleton responsible for much of the plasterwork found on many of the walls and ceilings in the ground floor, as well as the main staircase and first-floor lobby. Lucan House has some of the finest examples of neo-classical decoration in Ireland, beginning with the entrance hall, to the rear of which a screen of columns and pilasters painted to imitate Siena marble, provide access to the principal reception rooms. That to the immediate left here, now called the Wedgewood Room but originally the breakfast room, is a perfect square, its walls rising to a gently domed ceiling at the centre of which is a medallion depicting a warrior kneeling before Minerva accompanied by her maidens. Around the room, floral drops surround panels containing what appear to be grisaille paintings: in fact, these are in fact prints overpainted at some date when age had caused them to fade. To the rear is the drawing room, although this was intended to be the dining room. Its walls were left undecorated (and today covered in paper) but again the ceiling has been covered in plasterwork centred on another medallion, this one, somewhat unusually, featuring the Christ child and infant John the Baptist together with a lamb. The rear of the house is taken up by what is now the dining room but was originally intended to be the drawing room. The ceiling decoration here is simpler than that in the previous rooms, but the walls are decorated with plaster girandoles, their design found among those created by Michael Stapleton. Oval in shape, the bow in the window is echoed by a similarly curved wall centred on a door leading back into the entrance hall. This arrangement of the two rooms  – hall with screen of columns to the rear and central door opening into an oval room – is found in Castle Coole, County Fermanagh designed in the early 1790s by James Wyatt.
Agmondisham Vesey died in 1785 and having no children, left the estate to his nephew Colonel George Vesey. The latter’s only child, Elizabeth Vesey, married Sir Nicholas Colthurst and their descendants lived at Lucan House until the property and its contents were sold in September 1925 by Captain Richard Colthurst (later eighth baronet), after which it was occupied by Charles Hugh O’Conor and then his son-in-law William Teeling. In 1942 the building and surrounding gardens were rented by the Italian government and then bought 12 years later, to serve as a residence for its ambassador. It continued to serve the same purpose until this month, at the end of which the present ambassador leaves his position and the property passes into the hands of a new owner, the local authority, South Dublin County Council. What happens to both house and grounds in the future remains to be seen. 



For anyone wondering, the bronze buffaloes seen in the grounds and fibreglass horse in the entrance hall, all by contemporary Italian artist Davide Rivalta and placed in their present positions last year, are due to remain on site. 

Corbalton



Corbalton Hall dates from 1801 when the house was designed by Francis Johnston. The foremost architect of the period, Johnston was responsible for some of Ireland’s most significant buildings, such as Dublin’s GPO and the Chapel Royal in Dublin Castle, as well as many other country houses. His client on this occasion was Elias Corbally, a wealthy miller who bought the estate along with an older house, since demolished, called Cookstown. To commemorate his family, Corbally decided to name the new house Corbalton Hall. A flawless example of fashionable neo-classical taste, Corbalton is faced in crisp limestone, the two-storey facade defined by a freestanding Ionic portico. The windows on either side are set in shallow recesses with semi-elliptical fluted panels above them. Inside, the building follows a typical tripartite plan, with a central entrance hall flanked by the main reception rooms, accessed through meticulously finished mahogany doors. To the rear of the hall is the cantilevered staircase in pale Portland stone, the whole space amply lit by a generous bowed window on the return and leading up to a series of bedrooms.







Symmetry and order are paramount in Johnston’s neo-classical houses, so Corbalton Hall’s drawing room and dining room have exactly the same proportions, although the former has a large east-facing bow window offering views across the surrounding demesne. All the windows on this floor are set in shallow recesses holding the shutters, at the top of which can be seen a design detail typical of Johnston’s work: a fan-like fluted, semi-circular motif. In 1970 the original Cookstown House was demolished, leaving an empty space between Johnston’s villa and the stable block which he had also designed. At the start of the present century, however, an extension designed by conservation architect David Sheehan was added to the rear of Francis Johnston’s Corbalton Hall, on the footprint of the demolished building, thereby restoring coherence to the site. Fortunately the handsome stable yard survives and beyond it lie further work yards leading to a pair of substantial walled gardens (the first of them terraced), all essential features of a functioning country house. 







It is worth noting that Elias Corbally was a Roman Catholic, and a keen campaigner for the repeal of the Penal Laws, together with full civil rights for members of his faith. As a result, the Corballys became associated through marriage with other notable Catholic families elsewhere in County Meath. In 1817, for example, Elias’s only daughter Louisa Emilia Corbally married Arthur Plunket, 10th Earl of Fingall who lived not far away at Killeen Castle which had only recently been enlarged and altered by Francis Johnston. The Fingalls had always been Catholic, as were the Prestons, Viscount Gormanston: in 1842 Elias’s son and heir Matthew married the Hon Matilda Preston, daughter of the 12th Viscount. In 1865 their only child, and Elias’s granddaughter, Mary Margaret Corbally would marry Alfred Stourton, 24th Baron Segrave whose family title went all the way back to 1283; like the others, his ancestors had always remained Catholic.  Their son, Colonel the Hon Edward Plantagenet Joseph Corbally Stourton was the last of the family to live at Corbalton Hall, selling the property in 1951. It then passed through several owners before being acquired a few years ago by the present owner who has carried out extensive restoration and refurbishment work on the building. 


A Handsome Ensemble



Temple House, County Sligo has featured here before (see Thinking Big « The Irish Aesthete), on which occasion the immensity of the building was discussed. The property’s stableyard was constructed on a similarly substantial scale, reflecting the affluence of the Perceval family at the time. The main house, dating from 1825 and built in the then-fashionable neo-classical style, was greatly altered and enlarged less than half a century later and no doubt the same was also true of the U-shaped stables, entered through gateposts on the south-west side of the site. Facing this is a carriage entrance taking the form of a pedimented triumphal arch with Doric pilasters on either side and a clock tower cupola above. On either side are eleven-bay, tw0-storey wings, of ashlar limestone like all the rest, and centred on three-bay pedimented breakfronts. An exceptionally handsome ensemble that will, in time, find a new purpose.


Setting an Example



Drayton Villa in Clara, County Offaly dates from 1849 when built for Lewis Goodbody at the time of his marriage to Rebecca Clibborn. The Goodbodys were a Quaker family who had moved into this part of the country in 1825 and established a number of industries in the town, including a milling business and a jute factory, taking advantage of the river Brosna, The original block was of three bays and two storeys over basement, but in the mid-1860s another two-storey bay was added to the west side of the house, while a conservatory (since lost) was built on the building’s east side. Drayton Villa remained home to successive generations of Goodbodys until 1934 when it was sold to the Roman Catholic church for use as the parish priest’s residence. In February 2020, the house and 25 acres of land were offered for sale for €675,000 and subsequently bought by Offaly County Council ‘for public purposes’. Local media reports suggest that the land might be used for building a new school but nothing seems to have happened and in the meantime Drayton Villa has sat empty and boarded up. Is this the kind of example a local authority wants to set for the maintenance of its architectural heritage?