Category Archives: Kildare

Designed rather for Military than Ecclesiastical Purposes


‘The churchyard of Mainham is situated close to a remarkable moat near the entrance gate to Clongowes Wood College, the former residence of a family named BROWNE who in their day called the place Castle Browne which reverted to its present ancient name when this well-known Roman Catholic College was founded there. Extensive remains of the old church and buildings in connection with it still exist. By the side of the little trefoiled-headed window of the chancel is a small circular mural table with the following inscription:-
+
IHS
Here lieth ye body of Margrate DILON who deceased February ye 7th 1816 aged 68 years. & also ye body of Danniall BYRN who deceased May ye 30 17_8 aged 77 years.
Erected by Barnaby BYRN
A small coat-of-arms, of the O’BYRNE family is cut in relief below the inscription.’
Lord Walter FitzGerald, Journal of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead, 1904




The Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, otherwise known as the Knights Hospitaller, was a mediaeval military order founded in the early 12th century. Originally established to care for pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem during the Crusades, the order developed into an international body of mounted knights. Members took an oath to provide hospitality for the sick, injured and poor, while also training for warfare in defence of Christianity. The Knights Hospitaller arrived in Ireland around the same time as the Cambro-Normans and here, as elsewhere, the order was organised around a central Priory and Preceptories. In 1174, Richard de Clare, otherwise known as Strongbow, established the Priory of Ireland and Hospital of St John at Kilmainham on the outskirts of Dublin: it stood to the west of the site where the Royal Hospital Kilmainham now stands (some of the stones of the old priory were supposedly incorporated into the hospital’s chapel). Eventually the order had 129 preceptories across the country, including one already seen here at Kilteel, County Kildare (see Inside the Pale « The Irish Aesthete). Elsewhere in the county, another was found at Mainham. 




According to the Rev. M Comerford in Collections relating to the Dioceses of Kildare And Leighlin (1883), ‘the old parochial church of Mainham, or Menham, still exists in ruins. It was about 65 feet in length, by 18 in width. A tower with a stone staircase, stands on the south-eastern side and appears to have been designed rather for military than ecclesiastical purposes. The church-ruin stands in the midst of an extensive burial-ground.’ Little has changed since this was written, indeed the church was already recorded as being a ruin by the mid-17th century. Like so many other such places in Ireland, even after the building ceased to be used for religious services, it continued to be used as a burial site, with a number of attractive old funerary monuments found here, not least that mentioned above. 


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Remembrance of Things Past



Recently going through the ever-expanding collection of photographs, the Irish Aesthete came across a cache, taken some years ago and showing Drummin, County Kildare. Until his death five years ago, this house was home to the hospitable Grattan de Courcy Wheeler, whose many lunches and dinners, prepared by an ever-loyal housekeeper Mary, were renowned for their length and liveliness. Grattan was a throwback to the kind of 18th century landed gentleman described with various degrees of delight and disapproval by the likes of Sir Jonah Barrington, Arthur Young and many others. Drummin too seemed to belong to an earlier age, certainly many modern comforts were not to be found there but that rarely deterred guests from accepting an invitation to visit and, if the evening went on too late (and the claret was poured too liberally), to stay overnight. 





Its name derived from the Irish Droim Mín, meaning ‘Little Ridge of a Hill’, Drummin dates from the mid-18th century, a lease for some 580 acres of land here being taken out in 1746 by the Rev Richard Grattan: in 1840 this lease would be renewed for three lives by his grandson Dr Richard Grattan. The Grattans of Drummin were related to Ireland’s famous parliamentary patriot, Henry Grattan, both branches seemingly descended from the Rev Patrick Grattan of Belcamp, County Dublin: two of the Rev Patrick’s sons, Robert and John, also both clergymen, were executors of the will of Jonathan Swift, a family friend. As for Drummin, the original house was of two storeys over basement and with a rendered facade of three bays (five bays to the garden front). It is thought that the centre breakfront originally contained the main entrance to the building (where an arched window is now) but in the 19th century single bay extensions were added to either side, that to the north containing a new entrance hall. According to legend, when the house was first being constructed, a curse was put on the place that no eldest son would succeed his father, and indeed this is what came to pass while the Grattans owned the property. The aforementioned Dr Richard Grattan, a distinguished Dublin physician, had two sons, one of whom died at the age of 15, the other at the age of 22. Drummin was therefore inherited by the doctor’s daughters, Anne and Elizabeth, and, following the former’s death, the house and estate, which by then ran to 2,000 acres, passed to Robert ‘Diamond’ de Courcy Wheeler, a doctor who served as Chief Medical Officer to the British army in Malta during the First World War. 





Robert de Courcy Wheeler does not appear to have spent too much time in Drummin, living for many years in south Dublin. In 1939 the property was inherited by his son, Cecil de Courcy Wheeler who, when the Land Commission broke up the old estate, established a successful mushroom growing business on what land he still retained. In due course, Drummin passed to his son, Grattan and following the latter’s retirement from many years working in banking in England and the United States, he settled in the house and, as already mentioned, embarked on some two decades of entertaining his wide circle of friends. Little was done to the place, with rooms always rather higgledy-piggledy and heating something of a rarity: on winter nights, guests could be found jostling for a place in front of the drawing room fire. Some time after Grattan de Courcy’s death, Drummin was sold. Now in new ownership, no doubt it will undergo some changes and necessary improvements. But these pictures are a souvenir of how it used to look, a remembrance of things past.



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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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What a Waste


The history of Knockanally, County Kildare is rather opaque, although it is known that the Coates family, the first of whom appears to have arrived in Ireland in the early 1700s, acquired the land on which it stands from the Aylmers who lived not far away at the now-derelict Donadea Castle (see Another Blot on the Landscape « The Irish Aesthete). Some kind of residence was built at Knockanally and in the mid-18th century this was occupied by one William Coates, known to have died in 1766 when the property was inherited by his eldest son, Matthew. When his grandson William Lancake Coates died in the following century, Knockanally was inherited by William Coristine Coates, the son of his cousin. His descendants appear to have continued living on the estate until it was taken over by the Irish Land Commission in 1942 and subsequently divided among various farmers. The immediate demesne and main house were then sold to a Captain Sheppard, who in turn sold it to the Maharani of Baroda. In 1959, ownership passed to the Rehabilitation Institute, which used the house as a convalescent home for the victims of polio.Further changes of ownership seem to have followed before Knockanally was bought in 1983 by Noel Lyons, who turned the land into an 18-hole golf course. 





As it appears today, Knockanally dates from c.1843 when commissioned by William Lancake Coates on a site east of the original house. The architect responsible was Dublin-born William Deane Butler, much of whose work involved designing institutional buildings such as court and market houses, although he did receive commissions for a number of country houses also. As noted by the late Jeremy Williams, Knockanally is almost a cube, ‘if its height is assessed on the three-storied central bay.’ Of two storeys over basement and faced with wonderfully crisp limestone ashlar, the building is entered via an Ionic portico flanked by Venetian windows with a third directly above it. On this level, windows within shallow recesses open onto balconies: these can also be found on each of the four-bay side elevations. Seemingly the interior featured a central, double-height and top-lit hall. Williams has noted that this is a reduced version of the hall in Dublin’s Broadstone station, designed by John Skipton Mulvany who, he suggests, may therefore have had a hand in Knockanally. As for the very substantial and elaborate gatelodge at the entrance to the former estate, J.A.K. Dean dates this to c.1870, too late to have been designed by either Butler (who died in 1857) but may have come from Mulvany as he lived until that date. 




In September 2010 it was reported that one of the country’s banks had appointed a receiver over Knockanally Golf Club, set in 125 acres; this move came a few days after creditors of Ferndale Leisure, the holding company behind the club, had met to appoint a liquidator; at the time, with an economic recession at this height, quite a number of Ireland’s golf clubs were going into receivership. Three years later, the club, the main house, gate lodge and a number of golf ‘lodges’ in the grounds, was sold to a Warwickshire-based company, St Francis Group for  €1.1 million: some years earlier, this portfolio had been valued at €3.5 to €4 million. Quite what has happened since then seems to be unclear. Refurbishment work was carried out on the house and other buildings on the site, but in September 2018 the local Leinster Leader reported that the golf club had again closed down and was to be offered for sale. Since then, both the house and gate lodge have remained closed and boarded up, with inevitable deterioration in the fabric of both buildings. A dreadful waste.

Saint or Goddess?


Later this week, February 1st will mark St Brigid’s Day. For those readers unfamiliar with her, Brigid is one of Ireland’s three national saints (the other two being Patrick and Columba), but not much is known about the woman. Supposedly she was born c.451, the daughter of a chieftain and a slave who had been baptised by St Patrick, was raised in a Druid household but then converted to Christianity and founded a religious house for women in what is now Kildare. Inevitably she also established other churches elsewhere in the country (early Irish saints were much given to roaming about the island) and performed many miracles. She is said to have died in 525 and a cult soon developed around her: the first account of Brigid’s life was produced during the following century by St Ultan of Ardbraccan. But did she actually exist? An increasingly popular theory proposes that Brigid was originally a pagan goddess, daughter of the Dagda (a kind of father-figure in ancient Irish mythology), and that with the arrival of Christianity her cult was simply transferred to a holy nun. The day on which she is annually celebrated, February 1st, happens to have been the occasion of a pagan festival marking the onset of Spring. This alternative image of Brigid is now widely promulgated: Dublin, for example, is about to host a five-day festival celebrating ‘the spirit and legacy of the Celtic goddess Brigit’, although quite what an imaginary deity’s spirit and legacy may be remains unclear. Meanwhile, in Kildare where the saint is supposed to have founded her community, the local authority is running Brigid 1500, a week-long festival intended to ‘celebrate and commemorate the extraordinary St Brigid, – A Woman, A Life, A Legacy- and the enduring impact of her life as we reach the 1500th anniversary of her passing.’





In the centre of Kildare town, St Brigid’s Cathedral is said to stand on the site where the aforementioned saint established a church and community of like-minded women in the year 480. This foundation survived long after Brigid’s death, becoming a double community of women and men, over which an Abbess ruled (as indeed, she held jurisdiction over the local bishop). Successive generations of nuns kept alive the memory of their founder by tending a fire which was never allowed to go out. In his Topographia Hibernia of c.1188, Gerald of Wales (otherwise known as Giraldus Cambrensis) wrote, ‘At Kildare, in Leinster, celebrated for the glorious Brigit, many miracles have been wrought worthy of memory. Among these, the first that occurs is the fire of St. Brigit, which is reported never to go out. Not that it cannot be extinguished, but the nuns and holy women tend and feed it, adding fuel, with such watchful and diligent care, that from the time of the Virgin, it has continued burning through a long course of years ; and although such heaps of wood have been consumed during this long period, there has been no accumulation of ashes.’ Gerald also noted that the fire was surrounded by a circular hedge made of stakes and brushwood, into which no man could enter. If any male was so foolish as to do so, ‘he will not escape the divine vengeance.’ Despite these supposedly secure defences, in 1220 Henry de Loundres, Archbishop of Dublin ordered the extinction of the fire. Meanwhile, the church first established by Brigid underwent similar traumas: it was pillaged and burnt by the Vikings in 835, then rebuilt before being burnt again on a couple of occasions in the mid-11th century and then plundered in 1136.





As seen today, St Brigid’s Cathedral was begun at some date in the 1220s by Ralph of Bristol, Bishop of Kildare. Like its predecessors, this suffered assault several times and, following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the mid-16th century, fell into serious disrepair. The roof was taken off in 1588 and the building was judged ruinous in 1615. The diocese of Kildare was always among the poorest in the country, and this helps to explain why the cathedral was so often left in poor condition. In 1681 William Moreton embarked on restoring the building with what resources were available; he would write to the Duke of Ormond that he had ‘endeavoured the most since he came to Kildare to repair the insupportable ruins of it.’ Repairs to the choir, nave and chancel cost £500, of which £200 came from private subscriptions, with Moreton providing £112. Work was completed in 1686. Nevertheless, further dilapidation occurred and finally, in the mid-1870s and over the next 20 years, St Brigid’s Cathedral underwent a thorough restoration overseen by George Edmund Street, with an initial budget of £5,000 although the eventual cost was more than double this figure. This is the building seen today, rather severe with exposed stone walls and just a few ancient monuments, or parts of these, which had survived the various attacks on the fabric. Outside is a round tower, the second tallest in Ireland, which has similarly undergone repairs and improvements over the centuries. Brigid: Christian saint or pagan goddess? Take your choice…

A Monument to Past Follies


Follies, the name given to buildings that serve no purpose other than to delight the eye, were as popular in 18th century Ireland as they were in other parts of Europe during the same period. James Howley’s invaluable The Follies and Garden Buildings of Ireland (1993) notes that part of the charm of these buildings lies in their inconsistency, their failure to comply with recognisable categories of style. ‘In one sense, their designers are architecture’s greatest plagiarists, happy to quote unashamedly from anything good that is going, with a rather cavalier attitude to time and geography.’ Even reaching consensus on what qualifies as a folly is something of a challenge, although in Monumental Follies (1972) Stuart Barton rather neatly summarised them as ‘foolish monuments to greatness and great monuments to foolishness.’ In the same year as this work appeared, the late Mariga Guinness claimed that Ireland had more follies to the acre than anywhere else in the world, and while that assertion has yet to be put to the test, it is certainly true that this country has an ample supply of such buildings, although alas many of them have now fallen into a ruinous state. One such folly can be found in Nurney, County Kildare.





Curiously not mentioned by Howley, the Nurney Folly, like so many of its kind, sits on a rise so that it can be seen from some distance and also offers views over the surrounding countryside. The lower part of the structure is square and built of rubble stone, with openings at the centre of each side. The interior, a single chamber, is lined in brick, with a brick floor and a vaulted ceiling which has a small opening at its centre. To what would have been the rear of the folly, where the land drops steeply towards a tributary of the river Barrow, there is a lower floor, with two openings. Most likely this was a storage area where food and drink could be prepared by servants for those visiting the room above. On top of that space rises a great brick octagon, considerably taller than the square base on which it rests. On this level there is only one opening, facing north. From the ground, no trace of a roof can now be seen. Who was responsible for commissioning the building appears to be unknown. The nearest owners of a substantial property were the Bagot family who lived in Nurney Castle (since demolished), so perhaps the folly was constructed for them. They remained in Nurney until the mid-1830s but had departed by the time Samuel Lewis published his Topographical Survey of Ireland in 1837 when the property was occupied by one J.W. Fitzgerald Esq. It transpires that Nurney Castle’s previous resident, Captain Charles Bagot, had emigrated with his family to Australia: in Adelaide they built a new home, which in memory of their old one, they called Nurney House. 





In design, the Nurney Folly bears similarities with two others in this country, one at Waterstown, County Westmeath (see The Wings of the Dove « The Irish Aesthete), the other at Emo, County Laois (see Deep in the Woods « The Irish Aesthete). Although more elaborate in their decorative detail, both feature octagons resting on square bases, and both have been attributed to Richard Castle, suggesting they were built during the second quarter of the 18th century. Noble & Keenan’s map of Kildare, produced in 1752, shows the folly, indicating that it is of the same period as the other two. The earliest Ordnance Survey map, dating from the late 1830s, describes the building as a Pigeon House (and the surrounding area as Pigeonhouse Hill). It may be that the upper portion of the folly was used for this purpose, as was also the case at Waterstown, while the lower part served as a destination in the demesne of Nurney Castle, a place in which to pause and take tea (or something stronger). Or it could be that by the time of the survey was being undertaken, the original purpose – or lack of purpose – of the folly had been forgotten and therefore this function was given to it. Whatever the case, today it stands forlorn on the edge of the village, a monument to the follies of earlier generations. 

Inside the Pale


The Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, otherwise known as the Knights Hospitaller, was a Mediaeval military order founded in the 12th century. The order came to have a number of bases, called preceptories, in Ireland, one of which was located at Kilteel, County Kildare. There seems to be some confusion about when this was established, and by whom: it may have been Gerald FitzMaurice, first Lord of Offaly, who died in 1204, or his son Maurice FitzGerald, the second lord who died in 1257. It must have been an important centre for the order, since three general chapters were held there during the 14th century. However, with the onset of the suppression of religious orders in the 16th century, Kilteel Preceptory was surrendered to the English authorities in 1540 and two years later granted to Thomas Alen, brother of Sir John Alen, Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Thereafter it fell into decay and little now remains of the buildings other than a few truncated stone columns, parts of a former gatehouse and the outline of a substantial enclosure. More impressive are the adjacent ruins of Kilteel Castle.





Kilteel stands on the boundary of the Pale, that area around Dublin which in the later Middle Ages remained under the control of the English government. Famously, in order to provide protection for its inhabitants, in 1429 King Henry VI offered a grant of £10 to every man within the Pale who built a castle over the next ten years. These castles, usually square or rectangular and several storeys high, are commonly known in Ireland as tower houses, and while they were being constructed prior to the king’s grant – and are similar to the Peel Houses found on the border separating England and Scotland – many of them date from the 15th century onwards. Such would appear to be the case with Kilteel Castle, which measures around 26 by 20 feet and rises five storeys to a height of 46 feet. The building is distinguished from many other examples by a curved projecting staircase in one corner and beside this a two-storey gate house with arched entrance. Immediately behind the tower houses is a large rectangular space, now used as a farmyard but perhaps demarcating the former bawn enclosure. An image published in the Dublin Penny Journal in October 1833 shows a two-storied gabled house, perhaps dating from the 17th century, on the other side of the gatehouse. Some of the outer walls of this building survive, sections of which are fronted with slates. 





Like the Knights Hospitallers preceptory, Kilteel Castle passed into the hands of Thomas Alen in the 1540s and his family appear to have remained owners of the property until the second half of the 17th century (although, according to Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, they were still claiming tithes there in 1837). However, repeated attacks on the building took their toll on its condition. It was raided and burnt by Rory O’More in both 1573 and 1574 but presumably remained in sufficiently good condition for the 11th Earl of Kildare to station 50 horsemen and 100 foot soldiers there in 1580 during the Second Desmond Rebellion. But in the aftermath of the following century’s Confederate Wars, the Civil Survey of 1654-56 could report that the parish of Kilteel contained ‘One Castle…wch in the year 1640 was valued to be worth sixty pounds butt being since ruined is now valued at ffourty pounds.’ In the second half of the 17th century, Kilteel Castle came into the possession of the Earl of Tyrconnell but following his support of James II the property was taken from him and acquired by the Hollow Sword Blade Company before being sold on in turn to Sir William Fownes. His descendants in turn disposed of Kilteel in 1838, by which time the old castle had long since ceased to be used as any kind of residence. 

A Stout Burial Place



Inside a walled enclosure overlooking the plains of County Kildare, the church of Oughterard (from the Irish Uachtar Árd, meaning ‘a high place’) is thought to have been originally established in the sixth or seventh centuries, although the present buildings are of later date. What remains of what must once have been a substantial religious settlement are a truncated round tower and a barrel-vaulted chancel with a 14th century three-light window at the east end. Much of the nave has been lost, but on the south wall is the burial site of Arthur Guinness, founder of a certain well-known Irish business. The reason he was entombed here: his maternal grandfather William Read was a tenant farmer in this part of the country (and, it is sometimes said, Arthur Guinness was born in his mother’s family house when she returned there for the event).


The Shifting Lens



Next week, on Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th May,  the 21st annual Historic Houses Conference takes place at Maynooth University, County Kildare with the theme ‘Picturing the Country House’. The Irish Aesthete will be among this year’s speakers, giving a talk entitled The shifting lens: A Century of Photographing Ireland’s Ruined Country Houses.
Over the past 100 years, many of these historic properties have been either destroyed or left to fall into ruin. During the same period, how such houses are represented in photographs has also changed. In the early 1920s, pictures were taken to provide objective evidence of damage and loss: their primary purpose was functional. However, gradually other, more personal responses to ruined houses began to emerge, so that today it might be said there is a pocket industry in recording decay and neglect (the Irish Aesthete is guilty as charged). Might this change in approach have affected attitudes towards Ireland’s country houses, perhaps encouraging perception of them less as emblems of a foreign oppressor and more as gracious remnants of a former era, their loss more a source of regret than delight. Over 100 years, have these photographs helped to alter ways of thinking, or do they reflect the evolution of a different mindset? To be discussed at next week’s conference…


For further information on the 21st annual Historic Houses Conference, please see 21st CSHIHE Conference flyer.pdf (maynoothuniversity.ie)

 

The Properest House



After Monday’s post about Maynooth Castle, here is another property formerly belonging to the FitzGerald family, and – if not still in their hands – at least in better condition. Kilkea Castle, County Kildare. The original building was erected in 1181 by Walter de Riddlesford but before long passed through marriage to Maurice FitzGerald, third Baron Offaly. While his successors never lived there full-time, Kilkea Castle was consistently maintained: in 1545 the Lord Deputy Anthony St Leger described it as being ‘the properest house and the goodliest lordship the King hath in all this realme.’ Following Maynooth Castle being irreparably damaged in 1642, Kilkea Castle became the FitzGeralds’ main residence until the late 1730s when they transferred to Carton. The building was thereafter let to tenants for the next century before being extensively remodelled by William Deane Butler for the third Duke of Leinster; what one sees today incorporates that Victorian work. Since being sold by the FitzGeralds in the 1960s, Kilkea Castle has been an hotel.