Tag Archives: Architectural History

Twins in Trinity



In Trinity College Dublin’s Front (otherwise known as Parliament) Square, two buildings with identical facades look across at each other. Planned in the mid-1770s by Sir William Chambers, but executed by Christopher Myers (and then completed after the latter’s death by his son Graham Myers), that to the north holds the college Chapel, that to the south the Theatre, now Examination Hall. Both are of five bays, with the three centre bays featuring a ground-floor arcade supporting Corinthian columns below a substantial pediment. While these are faced in Portland stone, the flanking single bay three storey offices are of granite ashlar. Yet, while the exteriors look the same, the interiors are very differen






Built 1777-86, and therefore preceding the nearby Chapel by a decade, Trinity College Dublin’s Theatre, now Examination Hall, is a five-bay hall with elliptical groin vaulted ceiling and plasterwork created by stuccodore Michael Stapleton. In a gallery above the facade arcade can be seen a gilded organ case was made in 1684 by Lancelot Pease, while the chandelier at the south end of the hall formerly hung in the Irish House of Commons. The walls here are hung with a series of portraits commissioned from Robert Home in1782, their frames carved by Richard Cranfield. However, much space on the west side is taken up by a monument to Dr Richard Baldwin, Provost of the college from 1717 until his death in 1758’ this superlative work, dating from 1781, was designed by Christopher Hewetson. Incorporating Italian Africano marble salvaged from an ancient Roman architectural site and a sarcophagus of Porto Venere Marble with gilt bronze feet, the white marble figures were carved in Rome and installed by Edward Smyth.






Soon after the theatre was finished, work began on the college’s chapel, completed in 1798. As with the other building, this is a five-bay hall, although somewhat longer and narrower in shape, with a bowed organ gallery at the south end (carved by Richard Cranfield) and an elliptical apse at the north end.
Between the nave’s arched openings, some glazed, some blind, paired and fluted Ionic pilasters lead the eye to the coffered ceiling with its rich plasterwork by Michael Stapleton. Additional light is provided by semi-circular clerestory windows above the cornice. As so often with churches, the building experienced alterations in the 19th century altering its hitherto pure classical character. Stained glass by Clayton & Bell was installed in 1865, depicting scenes of Moses and the Children, the Ransom of the Lord, the Sermon on the Mount, and Christ with the teachers of Law. The polychrome floor tiles were added to designs of John McCurdy, and, in 1872, stained glass windows were installed in the apse and centre, showing the Transfiguration, to designs by Mayer & Company. Nevertheless, even with these changes the chapel offers an example of decorative taste in Ireland on the eve of the Act of Union. 



The Irish Aesthete is generously supported by

The New World in the Old



The Roman Catholic St Joseph’s church in Valleymount, County Wicklow originally dates from 1803 but its granite facade and porch were added around 1835. With pilasters rising above the level parapet to piers topped with slender decorative pinnacles, it is claimed that the porch was either designed by a local priest inspired by churches he had seen on a visit to Malta, or was constructed by parishioners who had visited New Mexico (now Texas). Only the deadening expanse of tarmacadam around the building would remind visitors that they were in Ireland. Inside, the side aisles hold a two pairs of bejewelled stained glass windows from the Harry Clarke studios, installed in the 1930s.





The Irish Aesthete is generously supported by

In a Disused Graveyard


The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never any more the dead.




The verses in it say and say:
‘The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.’

So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can’t help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?




It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.

In a Disused Graveyard by Robert Frost
Photographs of St Mary’s church and graveyard, Castlehill, County Down

The Irish Aesthete is generously supported by

A Swifte Burial



Located beside a now-disused church and within an old graveyard at Castlerickard, County Meath is this curious limestone pyramid, each of its steeply pitched sides carrying a raised diamond. One of them carries the name Swifte, indicating that the monument commemorates a member of the family of that name, possibly Godwin Swifte who died in 1815 and owned a property in this part of the country, the picturesquely named Lionsden, which still stands. Godwin Swifte belonged to a branch of the same family as Jonathan Swift, the famous Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. 



The Irish Aesthete is generously supported by 

A Vanishing World


Many people will be familiar with the photographs taken during the last century by the Jesuit priest, Fr Francis Browne, both those of the Titanic (which he boarded for its maiden voyage before disembarking prior to its ill-fated voyage across the Atlantic Ocean) and those depicting everyday life in Ireland. Much less well-known are the series of country house pictures that Browne began to take from the late 1940s until a few years before his death in 1960. In 1947 he received the first of a series of commissions from the Irish Tatler & Sketch, which described itself as ‘Ireland’s Premier Social & Sporting Monthly.’ Many of these pieces featured not only photographs by Browne but also texts which he had written.
No information has been found to explain how the Irish Tatler & Sketch initiated contact with Browne, but by then, thanks to his work with the various other organisations, he was well-known as a photographer of exceptional ability. Furthermore, he had already been taking pictures of historic houses for some time, since during this period quite a number of them were occupied by Catholic religious orders. His earliest images of Rathfarnham Castle, for example, date from 1920, just seven years after the building had been bought by the Jesuit order. Similarly, he often photographed Emo Court in the years after it was acquired by the same order, for many of which he lived in the building.
However, Browne now began to take pictures of houses still in secular hands. In April 1945, in a letter to his Provincial Superior, he explained that earlier that year, while in Portlaw, County Waterford to give a Triduum (a Catholic religious observance lasting three days), he had received permission to visit nearby Curraghmore, home to the de la Poer Beresfords, Marquises of Waterford. ‘I did so,’ he elaborated, ‘because I am collecting a set of Georgian Houses, & Curraghmore was on the list given me by the Georgian Society.’ It is unclear which organisation he means, since the original Georgian Society had come to an end in 1913 and its eventual successor, the Irish Georgian Society, was not established until 1958; it may be that he was using the fifth volume of the Georgian Society Records (published 1913) which contained a catalogue of important country houses throughout the country, or else perhaps another work, Georgian Mansions in Ireland by Thomas Sadleir and Page L. Dickinson, which appeared in 1915 and which devoted several pages to Curraghmore.   In any case, it says a great deal about Fr Browne’s character and a reflection of his personal charm that he was able to gain access to so many houses at a time when they were still in private hands and not open to the public.

Killeen Castle, County Meath

The first country house photographed by Browne to appear in the Irish Tatler & Sketch was Shelton Abbey, County Wicklow, home for some 200 years to the Howards, Earls of Wicklow. By now it was home to the last of the family to live there, William Howard, eighth earl who in 1932 had converted to Catholicism, much to the disgust of his father (seemingly, he was appalled at the idea of Shelton Abbey’s heir attending the same church as the servants). Browne had visited the house in November 1946, but the following April he sought permission to go there again, as Lord Wicklow had recently told him ‘that owing to his circumstance, he proposes utilising Shelton Abbey as a kind of hotel or “Country Club”.’ He therefore wanted Browne to return to the house and take further photographs ‘before the necessary alterations are made.’ The building was then still filled with treasures accumulated by generations of Howards, many of them captured in situ by Browne as he and his camera went from room to room. He visited in good time because the hotel venture was not a success and after just three years Lord Wicklow was obliged to sell Shelton Abbey’s contents in a spectacular auction that lasted for 13 days. The great majority of lots went to overseas buyers and left Ireland, making Browne’s pictures priceless as a guide to how the house once looked. Shelton Abbey is today an open prison and much of its interior badly affected by institutional use.



Rockingham. County Roscommon

Some of the houses photographed by Browne have either since been demolished, such as Rockingham and Frenchpark, both in County Roscommon, or left a ruin, like Killeen Castle, County Meath. A number of others that he visited – the likes of Adare Manor, County Limerick and Dromoland Castle, County Clare – are now hotels. Many more, among them Knocklofty, County Tipperary and Glananea, County Westmeath, have changed hands on more than one occasion and long lost their original contents. Happily, the story of what has happened since that time is not all bad. Some of the houses Browne visited, not least Castletown, County Kildare and Malahide Castle, County Dublin, are now in public ownership and open to visitors, while the Ormond Castle, County Tipperary has, since passing into the care of the Office of Public Works, benefitted from an extensive programme of restoration. And a few of the houses shown over the coming pages remain in the same hands and have experienced relatively little change, among them the aforementioned Curraghmore and Lismore Castle, both in County Waterford, and Dunsany Castle, County Meath.

Shelton Abbey, County Wicklow

While Browne photographed more than 50 country houses, he did not cover all of Ireland. Had he been a free agent, he might have taken pictures of a great many other places but he could only go where he was permitted to go by his superiors in the Jesuit order; many visits to these historic properties were tagged on to other trips undertaken in the course of his work as a Catholic priest. In consequence, there are omissions. An obvious absence is Northern Ireland which, in the decades after Independence, Browne does not appear to have visited. Most of the houses he photographed were in the east, the Midlands and the south. Other than the two Roscommon properties already mentioned, the West is unrepresented, and, aside from two houses in County Louth and one in County Monaghan, he took no pictures of houses north of Dublin.
These gaps are regrettable but, given the photographer’s circumstances, understandable. We must be grateful that Browne managed to visit so many old houses and record them for posterity before the majority underwent irrevocable change. Not all of them feature in a new book, A Vanishing World: The Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne, published this week. Limitations of space and the desire to give adequate space to the houses included in the present work means many more had to be left out. In a small number of cases, the pictures are not of the best quality or of insufficient number to merit their presence. In others, the houses have already been well documented, and images of them are easily available to anyone interested. Pictures of a few more are included in the book’s introduction, such as Mespil House in Dublin, home for many years of the pioneering artist Sarah Purser, which Browne photographed just a couple of months after her death in August 1943. Within a decade, the mid-18th century building had been demolished, although thankfully three of its remarkable ceilings, attributed to the stuccodore Barthelemy Cramillion, were salvaged; two of them are now in Dublin Castle, and one in Aras an Uachtaráin. Then there was Lamberton, County Laois, a large two-storey Georgian houses which Browne visited in January 1944, just a few months before it was stripped of everything worth salvaging and then demolished. Heywood, also in Laois, had been acquired by the Salesian order in 1941 and Browne photographed it on two occasions, in July 1943 and September 1945. Again, these images are important because in January 1950 the house was gutted by fire and later levelled.
After the pictures of Shelton Abbey appeared in the Irish Tatler & Sketch in 1947, further examples of Browne’s country house photographs continued to appear in the magazine for a number of years, as they did in other publications, including Ireland of the Welcomes in 1953-54, and then The Irish Digest. By then he had stopped travelling so much – he was, after all, in his mid-seventies – and would lead a more retired life until his death in 1960. Like the rest of his output, for a long time his photographs of Irish country house were forgotten and even when other pictures had been rediscovered and published, this particular group has not been given much attention. This new publication therefore serves two purposes: it allows us to see how these buildings looked in the middle of the last century and it gives us an opportunity to celebrate once more the outstanding talents of Fr Francis Browne, photographer.

Frenchpark, County Roscommon

A Vanishing World: The Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne is published by Messenger Publications

The Irish Aesthete is generously supported by 

Inexplicable



Extraordinary to see that this gate lodge at Clonleigh, County Donegal has been left to fall into dereliction. Set at an oblique angle to the road, it formerly marked the entrance to an estate and since-demolished house owned by a branch of the Knox family. Single storey with an attic storey lit by shamrock motif windows, the building is faced in uncoursed rubble with dressed stone employed around the doors and windows. Thought to date from the mid-19th century, the lodge may have been designed by Welland and Gillespie, architects for the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who in 1863 were carrying out extensive works at the Church of Ireland church and parish hall in nearby Lifford: this would explain its decidedly church-like appearance. Harder to explain is why such a fine little house should stand unoccupied and threatened with ruin.



The Irish Aesthete is generously supported by

A Little Crazy



Hard to believe this is all that remains of Gallen Priory, County Offaly, a once-great religious house founded in 492AD by Saint Cadoc. After being badly damaged in the 9th century, the monastery here was restored by Welsh monks but several hundred years later, it came under the authority of the Augustinian order, remaining so until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1540s and thereafter falling into decay. Excavations of the site in the 1930s revealed parts of over 200 early Christian burial monuments and these have since been unsympathetically and randomly set in cement walls on the locations of what would have been the east and west gables of the church here, suggesting the inspiration was crazy paving.


A Fine Specimen


Handsomely set against a background of woodland, the 16th century tower house at Castlegrove, County Galway is known as both Feartagar Castle and Jennings Castle, the latter name derived from a family believed to have lived there for a period. The building is thought to have been constructed by the de Burgos (otherwise Burkes) who controlled much of the land in this part of the country, but the Jennings may indeed have been responsible, since the two families were related to each other. The surname Jennings originally McSeonins, or sons of John (de Burgo), which was first anglicised to Jonine and then to Jennings, sometimes spelled Jenings.




The castle comprises a rectangular, five-storey tower measuring some 12 by 10 metres. Both the eastern and west roof gables survive, as do chimney stacks on either end as well as on the northern side. At the top of each of the four corners are well-preserved curved bartizans, while above the pointed arch doorway on the eastern wall is a further machicolation. At various levels on every side are a series of arrow slits as well as a number of mullion windows with hood mouldings. Although apparently unoccupied since the mid-17th century, the building is in an excellent state of repair, certainly when compared with many other tower houses found elsewhere around the country. 




The castle is believed to have remained in the hands of the de Burgo or Jennings family until the 1650s when, like so many other such properties, it was taken from the owners by the Cromwellian government in the aftermath of the Confederate Wars. It was then granted to the Blakes, members of another well-known County Galway family who had likewise been displaced from their original land holdings. Successive generations of Blakes lived on the property until the mid-19th century, a new house being erected here in the 1830s. However, in the aftermath of the Great Famine, the entire estate was sold through the Encumbered Estates Court, bought for £15,750 by John Cannon. Following his death, it was sold again to Frederick Lewin and was inherited by his son Thomas before being burnt July 1922, seemingly by anti-Treaty forces. The remains are now lost in nearby woodland, with the older tower house today in better condition than its successor. 

State-Sponsored Neglect


Above are the front and rear elevations of Towerhill, County Mayo, a house believed to date from the close of the 18th century when built for Isidore Blake, whose descendants continued to own the property until 1948 when the building’s contents were auctioned and the place itself subsequently stripped of everything that might be removed, slates from the roof, floorboards and doorcases, chimneypieces and so forth. Of six bays and two storeys over basement, Towerhill is unusual in that all four sides of the house are pedimented, and finished to the same high standard; the architect responsible for this work is unknown. The property is now owned by the state’s forestry body, Coillte, which accounts for its neglected condition.


A New Vision


The narrative of the Irish country house as a place of dishevelment and decay has a long and melancholic history, stretching back to the publication of Maria Edgeworth’s seminal novel Castle Rackrent in 1800. Her vision of properties and their owners both being hopelessly atrophied found many fictional heirs for almost two centuries, continuing as late as Caroline Blackwood’s Great Granny Webster, which appeared in 1977 and Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour published four years later. These accounts present variations on the same theme: that the Irish country house, dank, gloomy and bitterly cold, has no viable future and is doomed to sink into ruin. In truth, the notion of the Big House – as such buildings are traditionally known in Ireland – being in terminal decline frequently had its basis in fact. In March 1912, Violet Martin, one half of the writing duo Somerville and Ross, informed her c0-author Edith Somerville about a recent visit to Tyrone House, County Galway which she found ‘rather dilapidated and ‘where rioted three or four generations of St. Georges – living with country-women, occasionally marrying them, all illegitimate four times over. No so long ago eight of these awful half-peasant families roosted together in that lovely house, and fought, and barricaded and drank, till the police had to intervene.’ Tyrone House duly served as the inspiration for Somerville and Ross’s 1925 novel, The Big House of Inver.





Fortunately, in recent decades there have been other, and happier, stories deserving to be told, as will be discovered in The Irish Country House: A New Vision. The fifteen houses featured offer an alternative narrative, not just about historic Irish properties but about Ireland herself. Once dogged by persistent poverty and a pervasive atmosphere of dejection, since the 1990s the country has undergone something of a transformation. This change of circumstances has brought with it fresh opportunities and the promise of a better future for Irish country houses. Formerly, the sale and abandonment of big old properties was a common occurrence, but this is no longer the only or even most frequent option. Instead, the possibility of a new life has become viable. Which is not to suggest that every historic house can be assured of a secure future; there are still buildings being lost, like so many of their equivalents in the past. But the chances of salvation are now much better than used to be the case.





Almost all the properties featured in The Irish Country House: A New Vision have had to undergo extensive restoration since the start of the present century, some of them are still in the process of being restored. Had they not been acquired or inherited by the present generation of owners it is probable that at least some of them would have been lost forever.
It takes a particular kind of pluck, or perhaps madness, to assume responsibility for a house much larger than the average family home, and constructed in an era when staff to maintain the building were plentiful and cheap. Fortunately, there are people gifted with this kind of pluck, along with generous quantities of imagination and determination. These traits are particularly necessary when the house in question is currently in poor condition, sometimes even downright ruinous. Not everyone possesses the character required for the task, just as not everyone wants to take on the challenge of bringing an old house back to life. Providentially, Ireland is blessed that there are increasing numbers of them who relish the opportunity, with all its potential highs and lows. Some of them feature in the book, but there are many more who are at different stages of the journey towards the creation of a viable, comfortable family home. The hazards of taking on an historic house are obvious, cost being just one of them. But there are advantages too, not least the chance to put your own stamp on a building. Along with installing new plumbing and electric wiring, with repairing gutters and replacing damaged windows, comes the possibility of further enhancing the character of a place, of adding another distinctive chapter to its story. This is what sets apart these properties. They disprove the long-standing narrative of the Irish country house as being in irremediable decline and instead inform us that these buildings have been blessed with an irresistible and dynamic new spirit.


The Irish Country House: A New Vision is published by Rizzoli