Category Archives: Galway

A Rich Man’s Extravagance


Born in County Down in 1766, at the age of 17 Alexander Henry emigrated to America where he established himself as a merchant in Philadelphia. Some years later, his nephew, also called Alexander Henry in turn moved to Philadelphia where he joined his uncle’s business, but then came back across the Atlantic to settle in England in 1804. The following year, in partnership with his elder brother Samuel, he set up a company in Manchester, A & S Henry & Co Ltd, that specialised in the marketing and distribution of cotton. The business was enormously successful, opening branch offices in Bradford, Belfast, Leeds, Huddersfield and Glasgow to act as collecting stations for textile products of all kinds; in consequence, the founding family soon became very wealthy, allowing its members to buy country houses and become Members of Parliament, as Alexander Henry duly did, representing South Lancashire. 





Mitchell Henry was born in 1826, second son of Alexander Henry, who some years earlier had married Elizabeth Brush, like him a native of County Down. Mitchell Henry trained to be a doctor, becoming a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and senior consultant at the Middlesex Hospital, London by the age of 30. However, following his father’s death in 1858, he ceased practising medicine, instead seeking election as an MP. ​Before then, he had married Margaret Vaughan whose family, once again, came from County Down; the couple would have nine children. Prior to that, and during their honeymoon, they travelled to the west of Ireland and were much taken with the scenery of Connemara. In consequence, after coming into his considerable inheritance, and following the Great Famine when large swathes of the country were offered for sale, Henry was able to buy Kylemore Lodge and some 13,000 acres of land in the west of Ireland from the impoverished Blake family. Here, from 1864 onwards, he embarked on building a new residence. At that date, this part of the country was exceptionally remote. The architect, and keen self-publicist, James Franklin Fuller, who designed the church at Kylemore (built in memory of Margaret Henry, following her unexpected death in 1874), remembered that to get there ‘was no easy matter. The train landed me at Westport the first day, the next meant posting to Leenane, the third was devoted to castle and church, while the fourth dropped me at Westport in time for the night mail; practically it “spoiled” a week.’ Constructing a large castle was something of an act of folly, since it involved considerable amounts of earthworks to clear the chosen site, as well as moving a road to the opposite side of Lake Pollacappul. As if that didn’t involve sufficient expense, instead of using local stone, the client insisted the building be cased in granite from Dalkey, County Dublin, sent by ship from one side of the country to the other. The main architect to work on this job was Galway-based Samuel Ussher Roberts, a great-grandson of the 18th century Waterford architect John Roberts. His design consists, as Mark Bence-Jones noted, of ‘romantic groupings of battlemented and machiolated towers and turrets’, the facade broken up by large and regular groupings of mullioned windows and oriels.’ The castle benefits enormously from its setting, with the mountains rising immediately to the rear and the lake, in which it is often seen reflected, directly in front. The interiors, beginning with the dark-panelled entrance hall, are harder to judge not least because they have been altered by subsequent owners and in addition were damaged by a fire in 1959. Their appearance, however, lacks the Gothic character of the exterior, and instead displays standard mid-Victorian style. The main reception rooms are large and high-ceilinged, with a variety of marbles employed for the chimney pieces, the finest of these being in the drawing room. The staircase hall leads to a first-floor gallery around which were grouped the main bedrooms. There is little here to set the space apart from any other country house of the period. In addition to the main castle, Mitchell Henry was responsible for commissioning the development of an eight-acre walled garden to supply him with all necessary fruit and vegetables: this has been restored in recent years.





Kylemore Castle was not Mitchell Henry’s only residence: he also owned a large property in London, Stratheden House. Originally designed in the early 1770s by Sir William Chambers, it was bought by Henry in 1863 and transformed into a vast Italianate villa by architect T. H. Wyatt before being filled with the owner’s objects d’art which included an antique bust of Agrippa and The Pompeian Mother, a statue by Giosuè Meli’s depicting a woman and child fleeing from the eruption of Vesuvius: this was displayed in its own Pompeian-style temple within the house. Much of the furniture was modern Italian replicas of originals in the Vatican and the Pitti Palace and among the most remarkable rooms was a library with ebonized woodwork and gold mouldings, green silkhung walls, and an ornate ceiling and frieze in Venetian cinquecento style, embellished with portraits of philosophers and poets. Alas, the extravagance of building and maintaining two such enormous and expensive houses, as well as draining bogland and improving conditions in Connemara, proved to be Henry’s undoing. From being very rich, he became rather poor; at the time of his death in 1910, he had only a few hundred pounds. Ten years earlier, Strathedan House and its contents were sold, and the building soon after pulled down, replaced by a block of apartments. Then in 1903 Kylemore Castle was also sold, to William Montagu, ninth Duke of Manchester and his wife, the American heiress Helena Zimmerman. The duke was a notorious spendthrift, as he proceeded to demonstrate in County Galway where he transformed much of the interior of his new property, taking out large quantities of stained glass from the main staircase window and much Connemara marble from a number of the rooms. Despite the considerable wealth of his wife’s family, he managed to run up an impressive number of debts: by 1918, 66 petitions of bankruptcy had been filed against him in the English courts. Two years later, Kylemore Castle was sold once more, this time to Benedictine nuns from Ypres, Belgian. Now called Kylemore Abbey, the order remains there to the present day. After running a girls’ boarding school on the site for many years, they have now turned it into one of the most successful tourist attractions in this part of Ireland.


Stepping Through the Gate: Inside Ireland’s Walled Gardens, an exhibition curated by the Irish Aesthete and featuring more than fifty specially-commissioned paintings by artists Lesley Fennell, Andrea Jameson, Maria Levinge and Alison Rosse has now opened at Kylemore Abbey where it can be seen until the end of April.  


 

Accidents Happen


Eight years ago, the Irish Aesthete wrote about the Volunteer Arch at Lawrencetown, County Galway (see: Gateway to the New Year « The Irish Aesthete). As was explained then, this monumental gateway was built in 1782 as the principal entrance to an estate called Bellevue owned by Colonel Walter Lawrence, an ardent supporter of the Volunteer movement and of Henry Grattan’s efforts to achieve greater legislative independence for the Irish parliament. Following the realisation of the latter ambition, the colonel erected this arch which consists of a main entrance flanked by smaller openings which in turn are connected to two-room lodges. The entrance is surmounted by a pediment topped with an urn and with a carved medallion beneath, while sphinxes rest on either side. A recessed panel directly beneath the pediment bears a Latin inscription which translated reads ‘Liberty after a long servitude was won on the 16th April 1782 by the armed sons of Hibernia, who with heroic fortitude, regained their Ancient Laws and established their Ancient Independence.’ The arch was restored some years ago, not least thanks to the efforts of a local voluntary group, but what was once the private entrance to an estate is now a public road and in consequence the structure recently suffered serious damage, as can be seen in the images below: these suggest that a tall vehicle collided with the upper section of the arch, knocking out the keystone and thereby rendering the whole thing vulnerable to collapse. Since it is listed for protection, the local authority has, it seems, committed to carrying out necessary repairs, and these need to be undertaken sooner rather than later if the arch is to survive. But just as importantly, some protective bollards need to be erected in its immediate vicinity, and perhaps something discreet to moderate the height of vehicles passing under the arch. Otherwise this will remain an accident waiting to happen again.



Photographs by George Gossip

Famously Abandoned II


Following last Wednesday’s post on the sad state of Woodlawn, County Galway (see Famously Abandoned « The Irish Aesthete) here are a couple of very early photographs of the place. Dating from the mid-1840s, they show the house prior to its transformation into the building which can be seen (albeit in very poor condition) today. This took place in 1859, seven years after the second baron had married, as his second spouse, the wealthy Elizabeth Oliver Gascoigne of Castle Oliver, County Limerick. It can be seen that the house’s facade formerly had full-height bows on either side of a recessed entrance with Venetian window on the first floor, and that there were single-storey wings on either side ending in what look to have been pavilions with three great arched windows beneath pediments. All of this would soon afterwards be encased in an elaborate – and no doubt expensive – Italianate aspect.

A Final Trace


Dominating the local landscape, this is Castleboy Tower, County Galway. Five storeys high and thought to date from the opening years of the 19th century, the building was once part of an estate owned by a branch of the Persse family, who also lived at the adjacent estate of Roxborough (childhood home of Lady Gregory) , and it would appear to have been constructed as a folly, or perhaps converted into one using an earlier building on the site. When the Land Commission divided up the estate, the tower was left stranded to one side of a small road constructed to provide access to various small farms and now provides the only surviving memory of the Persses’ presence here.


What Future?


‘There is also a convent for nuns of the Carmelite order, founded about the year 1680, and removed to its present site in 1829, when the building, including a chapel, was erected, under the direction of the prior of the abbey at a cost of £5,000, defrayed from the funds of the nunnery.’ (Slater’s National Commercial Directory of Ireland, 1846) Here is the former Carmelite convent in Loughrea, County Galway, built adjacent to the remains of an earlier religious foundation dating from 1300 when Carmelite friars settled on the site. It’s curious to see how, when the convent was built on what was then the outskirts of town, the style chosen by an unknown architect was that of a country house, of two storeys and five bays, the two outer ones projecting slightly forward and marked by prominent quoins. And the groundfloor entrance is distinguished by a handsome carved limestone doorcase, with sidelights and a plaque containing a crest above. The impression of a country house is somewhat spoiled by a large array of other structures subsequently added, indicative of what would eventually prove to be a misplaced confidence in the long-term future of the order here: six months ago, the five remaining Carmelite nuns left the property. What now is to be the fate of this building and its immediate neighbours? 

 

A Brighter Future?



The former Town Hall in Loughrea, County Galway. Occupying the site of an earlier linen hall the building, seemingly designed by Samuel Usher Roberts, dates from c.1860 when erected on the instructions of Ulick de Burgh, Marquess of Clanricarde who then owned Loughrea. In 1928 Viscount Lascelles, future sixth Earl of Harewood, who had inherited much of the Clanricarde estate through his grandmother, donated the town hall to the local residents; it was thereafter used as a cinema on the ground floor with a dance hall upstairs. The building was closed down in the late 1980s and has stood empty ever since but of late thanks to persistent efforts by the citizens of Loughrea plans have got underway for its restoration and conversion into a cultural and community centre. With funds now secured and an architectural design team appointed, the hope must be that, after more than 30 years of wasteful neglect, this building finally has a brighter future.*



*P.S. According to a tourist information board opposite the building, it was ‘used as a cinema in the mid 19th century.’ Who knew films were being screened in County Galway so far ahead of anywhere else…

Elsewhere in Town…


Thanks to the presence of the Trench family at Garbally on the edge of the town, the historic centre of Ballinasloe, County Galway has handsomestreets lined with fine stone buildings dating from the late 18th and 19th centuries. Alas, many of them have fallen into poor condition, such as this dwelling on the corner of Duggan Avenue and Church Hill (and therefore at a crucial space facing the St Joseph’s Church of Ireland). Dating from c.1810, more than a decade ago it was cruelly, and crudely, stripped of the original render during an apparent renovation scheme long since abandoned. The building is notable for its carved limestone doorcase and remains of a leaded fanlight. Alas its immediate neighbour is in little better condition and the house directly opposite retains only its ground floor walls. Disappointing to see what could be an enchanting spot in the town allowed to remain in such neglect.

All Ranks and Religious Distinctions


Dating from 1840 and designed by George Papworth, this is the Le Poer Trench Memorial in Ballinasloe, County Galway. An open-sided monument of limestone, above a raised base it comprises a fluted Doric column set on the diagonal of each square column directly behind, the whole supporting a deep frieze above which is set a domed roof with urn finials on top of the projecting corners. In the centre of the base rests a stone coffin, as the memorial was erected to commemorate the Venerable Hon. Charles Le Poer Trench who for many years served as Vicar of Ballinasloe (he was also Archdeacon of Ardagh) and who died in 1839. The Ven.Hon. Charles was a son of the first Earl of Clancarty (of the second creation) and originally, owing to its position atop a high mound, the memorial would have been visible from the family’s seat, Garbally which is located on the outskirts of the town. According to an inscription on one side of the memorial, it was raised thanks to ‘subscribers of all ranks and religious distinctions.’ 


Universally Lamented


After Wednesday’s post about the Denis Kelly’s round tower at Killeroran, County Galway, it is worth pointing out that at the opposite end of the graveyard stands his the former mausoleum of the family which used to occupy the now-demolished Castle Kelly. On one side of the entrance is a handsome tombstone, erected to the memory of John Kelly who was interred here in March 1813. As was ever the case, his death is recorded as being ‘universally lamented.’

Near Relations



A rather skinny 19th century round tower found in the graveyard at Killeroran, County Galway. It was erected in 1867, ten years before his death, by Denis Henry Kelly who lived not far away at Castle Kelly (otherwise known as Aughrane Castle). Unfortunately long before he died, Mr Kelly was obliged to sell the house and it was then entirely demolished in 1919. Rising more than 90 feet, the tower carries an commemorative inscription in Irish, but beside it stands a more modesty-scaled tombstone recalling Mr Kelly’s two wives, ‘both English women, they set themselves to the duties of their Irish home, and lived beloved by all, high and low, & died universally lamented.’ The first is described as ‘the beautiful Mary Moseley’ and the second as ‘Elizabeth Diana, the lovely daughter of John Cator.’ Their husband was also very keen to record his spouses’ aristocratic connections, so Mary Moseley was noted as being ‘the near relative of the Earl of Stamford and of the Actons, now Lord Acton.’ Meanwhile, according to her husband Elizabeth Cator had the good fortune to be ‘the near relation of the Marquis of Sligo and of Sir Ross Mahon.’ However, despite these socially prestigious links, neither wife was permitted to share Mr Kelly’s monument.