Category Archives: Historic Interior

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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A Remarkable Building



Lecturing at the recently established Royal College of Science in Dublin in 1868, John Ruskin declared that one of the chief reasons for his accepting an invitation to do so was that it allowed him ‘to stand near the beautiful building…which was the first realization I had the joy to see of the principles I had, until then, been endeavouring to teach.’ The edifice to which Ruskin referred is Trinity College Dublin’s Museum Building, now a venerable 170 years old but judged a radical instance of new design when first constructed. Writing in The Irish Builder in May 1866, Sir Thomas Drew declared it to be ‘a great work, most important in its influence on the arts in this country . . . To this remarkable building and to this alone we trace the inauguration of the great revolution in public taste which has since taken place.’ Even while still a work in progress, the Museum Building was exciting comment, William Allingham writing in May 1855, to William Michael Rossetti (brother of Dante Gabriel), ‘Yesterday in Dublin I saw but hastily the part-finished building in Trinity College, which is after Ruskin’s heart. Style early Venetian, I suppose, with numberless capitals delicately carved over with holly-leaves, shamrocks, various flowers, birds and so on. There are also circular frames here and there in the wall, at present empty, to be filled no doubt with eyes of coloured stone. Ruskin has written to the architect, a young man, expressing his high approval of the plans; so by-and-by all you cognoscenti will be rushing over to examine the Stones of Dublin.’ The origins of the building went back a couple of decades before its construction. In 1833 the college’s board launched a competition for the design of a museum to house  the geological and other collections which until then had been kept in a room in Regent House, the large block through which most visitors enter the campus. A number of architects submitted proposals, while others – not least Decimus Burton – declined invitations to do so. Eventually, in April 1853, a scheme from the firm of Deane, Woodward and Deane was accepted (although John McCurdy, who was the official college architect, insisted on taking credit for the original floor plans).  




The firm of Deane, Woodward and Deane – or more correctly ‘Sir Thomas Deane Knt., Son and Woodward’ – was founded in Cork in 1851 when the aforementioned Sir Thomas Deane took his son Thomas Newenham Deane and the Dublin-based architect Benjamin Woodward into partnership. Two years later the firm won the job of designing Trinity College’s Museum Building and in consequence it opened an office in the capital which thereafter became more important than that in Cork. Further commissions soon followed, not least for the Oxford Museum which, like that in Trinity College Dublin, is indebted to the Venetian Gothic style championed by John Ruskin. In the case of Trinity College, the exterior of the building is relatively plain, faced in blocks of Wicklow granite and broken by sequences of arched windows, those looking over College Park centred on sets of four, one above the over, the upper group also being given a balcony. The pilasters, capitals, voussoirs and soffits are all of Portland Stone, as are the sequence of roundels filled with coloured marbles. In every case, these features benefit from elaborate and individual design (notice, for example, how no two pilaster capitals are the same), exquisite carving work executed by a ‘Mr Roe’ of Lambeth and Cork-born brothers John and James O’Shea, also known for their playful capitals on the facade of the  former Kildare Street Club visible on the other side of College Park. Flanked by arched windows and beneath another balcony, the main entrance to the building has a tympanum of Caen Stone bearing the college crest.  Costing £12,768, three shillings and seven pence, the exterior dressings of the Museum Building were responsible for almost half its eventual figure of £27,980, six shillings and eight pence. 




Since being constructed, parts of the Museum Building’s interior have undergone modification, with many of the larger rooms being subdivided. What remains unchanged is the great, double-height stair hall, approached via a vestibule, the latter containing among other things the skeleton of an Irish Elk. The walls, originally intended to be of rubble masonry covered in plaster, are lined in Caen stone, selected by the architects as being more appropriate to the space. The Imperial staircase of Portland Stone leads to facing first-floor, triple-arched galleries supported by similar arcaded screens on the floor below. The columns are of different coloured polished stone, all of it Irish except for a dark-red serpentinite from Cornwall. There are 14 full columns which cost £13 each, 18  half-columns (£8 each) and 98 feet of Connemara marble used for the stair and balcony handrails (£122, 10 shillings). This great space is lit by glazed oculi set within a pair of shallow domes decorated with polychromatic brick, their central supporting arch carried on stone colonettes. Particularly in consequence of these domes, the impression is given of a harmonious marriage between the Venetian Gothic and Hispanic Moorish styles. Above the vestibule arches, for example, can be seen a series of small six-sided star openings; these are part of the architects’ original ventilation system reminiscent of those found in old hammams. Trinity College’s Museum Building has rightly been admired since first built (and, as mentioned above, even before its completion). The place is still much in use as part of a working university, which explains the somewhat distracting clutter. But that staircase and those soaring domes…


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Uncertain Future I


Just over a week ago, the handful of Cistercian monks still living at Mount Melleray Abbey, County Waterford left the premises and moved to another part of the country. The history of the abbey dates back almost 200 years, to the aftermath of the 1830 Revolution in France when a group of some 64 Irish and English monks were obliged to leave their monastery at Melleray in Brittany. Led by Melleray’s Prior, Waterford-born Fr Vincent Ryan, they arrived in this country in December 1831 and initially rented a property in County Kerry but soon found that site unsatisfactory and were then offered an alternative by Sir Richard Keane who a few years earlier had inherited a large estate at Cappoquin, County Waterford. Keane proposed the monks rent 600 acres of mountain land at a modest rent. Assisted by local people, the furze and scrub covering the property was gradually cleared and a working farm established. Meanwhile, preparations were made for the establishment of a new monastery, the foundation stone of which was laid on 20th August 1833, the feast of St Bernard of Clairvaux. Created an abbey two years later, with Fr Ryan as its first abbot, the monastery was named Mount Melleray, in memory of the French house left behind. 





For a long time, Mount Melleray thrived; at its height the monastery was home to some 150 priests and brothers. A school operated on the premises from 1843 until it closed in 1974 (see Untapped Potential « The Irish Aesthete) and in addition to the farm, there was a carpenters’ workshop, a forge and an aviary. Nothing offers better evidence of the Cistercian order’s confidence in the future than the great church, plans for which were first drawn up a century ago following the acquisition of all the cut limestone which had once been used for the exterior of Mitchelstown Castle, County Cork. That great house, which stood some 28 miles to the west west, had been burnt by anti-Treaty forces in August 1922 (see Doomed Inheritance « The Irish Aesthete) and stood empty when Mount Melleray’s Abbot Dom Marius O’Phelan proposed buying the stone. Once agreement had been reached, the material was transported by steam lorry in two consignments a day over a five-year period. Designed by the Dublin firm of Jones and Kelly which specialised in producing traditional designs for religious clients, the new abbey church’s foundation stone was laid in April 1933, shortly before the abbey celebrated the centenary of its foundation. With its great square lantern tower, the main body of work on the abbey church was completed in November 1940, although it was only somewhat later that the high altar and some 20 lesser altars, gifts of benefactors, were installed, together with stained glass, some of which was made by the Harry Clarke Studios. At the south-west corner of this building and at a right-angle to it, a smaller, ‘public’ church was also built, again to the designs of Jones and Kelly and again with stained glass from the Clarke studios. The interior here is also decorated with extensive use of mosaic on the walls. The church was originally dedicated to Saint Philomena, and was once the National Shrine of the latter saint. However, her statue was removed when, on instructions from the Holy See in 1961, Philomena’s name was removed from all liturgical calendars. 





So what will happen now to these churches and all the ancillary buildings around them, once accommodating hundreds of monks and visitors but now standing empty? The last eight monks have moved to another monastery, Mount St Joseph, County Tipperary and no decision has been taken on the future of the abbey at Mount Melleray. In Ireland of the 21st century, this is not an unusual circumstance: the numbers of people choosing to enter the religious life has dropped steeply in recent decades, and one legacy are substantial properties that are surplus to their original requirement. Finding an alternative purpose, especially for a site such as this one, which is relatively isolated, several miles from the nearest town and with no public services in the vicinity, will be challenging. And yet, again like so many others, the buildings are sturdily constructed and, in this particular instance, of architectural interest not least for the incorporation of cut stone from Mitchelstown Castle. A conundrum. 


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Resisting the Rector’s Request




Standing in a field just outside the walls of the graveyard at Mainham, County Kildare, this is the Browne Mausoleum dating from 1743. The man responsible for commissioning the work, Stephen Fitzwilliam Browne of Castle Browne (today Clongowes Wood College), had wanted the building to stand within the graveyard but the local rector wanted to charge him five guineas for the privilege, perhaps because Browne was a Roman Catholic. Refusing to pay, he latter opted to build the mausoleum on his own land instead; a stone slab over the entrance tells the story, the rector described as ‘the only clergyman in the diocese whose passion would prevent their church to be embellished or enlarged, and to deprive themselves and their successors from the burial fees; and he has been the occasion of obliging said Browne to erect said monument here on his own estate of inheritance, which said Browne thinks proper to insert here to show it was not by choice he did it. May the 1st 1743.’
Inside, the mausoleum holds a stone altar with the figures of Browne and his wife in relief, kneeling on either side of the crucified Christ, with the wall above embellished in stucco with fluted pilasters and a frieze of seraphim. On the north wall is an earlier monument to Thomas Browne (died 1693) featuring a seraphim at its base, a coat of arms and heraldic medallions above a lengthy inscription and on top a large urn flanked by skulls.



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Ill-Advised Indifference


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

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Operation Transformation


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






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





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


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The Ascent to Knowledge


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

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All in the Detail


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


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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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