What remains of the old church in Dromore (from the Irish for a high ridge), County Tyrone. Perched above the village, the ruins may incorporate a medieval place of worship, which was reportedly burnt in 1641 during the Confederate Wars. The church was then rebuilt in 1694 and remained in use until the early 1840s when a new one was erected on another site. The surviving outer walls are surrounded by old gravestones.
Fruit Hill, Co Wexford recently featured here (see https://theirishaesthete.com/2020/03/07/a-labour-of-love), a sensitively restored house believed to date from the second quarter of the 18th century and notable for being U-shaped with two wings projecting behind the one-room-deep residence with only a narrow passage between them. A similar house stands, just about, in neighbouring County Carlow and is called Mount Pleasant. Mark Bence-Jones’ Guide to Irish Country Houses includes four properties of the same name, but this is none of them. Indeed, little documentation exists about the Carlow house and some of it is erroneous.
Mount Pleasant was built and occupied by the Garrett family. The first of them, James Garrett was the son of a Captain John Garrett, one of five brothers who came to Ireland in the 17th century around the time of the Cromwellian Wars and, like many others, was rewarded for his efforts with a grant of land in County Laois. James Garrett on the other hand settled in Carlow around 1700 when in his mid-20s. He may have been responsible for building a house called Janeville, or it could have been his son whose tomb in the local church refers to ‘the charitable Thomas Garrett of Janeville deceased, Aug.31st, 1759, aged 48 years.’ The same church also contains a monument to another Garrett, the inscription of which runs as follows: ‘Here lie deposited in humble hope of a joyful resurrection the mortal remains of James Garrett, late of Mountpleasant, Esq. – Vain would prove an attempt at panegyric; since no eulogy could do justice to his merits. Reader, wouldst thou be had in everlasting remembrance? Endeavour to emulate his virtues. He departed this life July the 17th, 1818. Aged 72 years.’ Because James Garrett might have been the son of Thomas Garrett, it has often been assumed that the latter’s house, Janeville, was renamed Mount Pleasant by the former, and that they lived in the same property. In fact, this is not the case as Janeville and Mount Pleasant – which is seen in today’s pictures – are different houses, albeit in the same part of the county.
Some four miles apart, Janeville and Mount Pleasant were both once Garrett houses and dated from the early years of the 18th century, but while the first of these is still intact, the second, as can be seen, has fallen into ruin. Stylistically they share similarities, both having five bay facades centred on a granite doorcase with sidelights. Both are also of three storeys, although only two are visible from the front of Janeville which as a delightful Venetian window on the first floor above the entrance. The attic windows can be seen on the double-gabled side elevations. Mount Pleasant, on the other hand, features attic windows on its façade, with a tiny Diocletian window in the centre. And the rear of the building is like that of Fruit Hill, County Wexford, with wings creating a U-shaped house. At Mount Pleasant, the centre of the back evidently had a Gothic arched window, now blocked and the entire west wing was, at some unknown date, allowed to fall into dereliction, the owners only occupying the eastern side of the building. It was sold a couple of years ago, but no work has been done on the property and so the decline continues. However, as Fruit Hill shows, no house is ever beyond redemption; perhaps this one may yet find a saviour.
The market house in the centre of Dunlavin, County Wicklow The building dates from 1743 when constructed for local landlord Robert Tynte who was keen to improve the economic prospects of the town. Entirely of granite, the market house is cruciform in shape, the base rising up to a cylindrical tower topped with fluted dome; each of the four corners is occupied by Doric colonnades. Originally the arches around the building were open, but these have since been filled in and today it serves as a library. The market house’s design was attributed by the Knight of Glin to Richard Castle, but Maurice Craig begged to differ, declaring ‘it seems to me for all its charm and merit too clumsy to be the work of an academically accomplished designer.’
‘Immediately approaching Navan, the river [Boyne] makes a bold sweep round the foot of the hill, from which rise up the ruins of Athlumney Castle, the dilapidated towers and tall gables of which shoot above the trees that surround the commanding eminence on which it is placed, while glimpses of its broad, stone-sashed and picturesque windows, of the style of the end of the sixteenth century, are caught through the openings in the plantation which surrounds the height on which it stands. This beautiful pile consists of a large square keep, with stone arched floors and passages rising into a tower, from which a noble view can be obtained on a clear day; and a more modern castellated mansion, with square stone-mullioned windows, tall chimneys and several gables in the side walls.’
‘Of the history of the castle of Athlumney and its adjoining church, there is little known with certainty; but, standing on the left bank of the Boyne, opposite this point, we cannot help recalling the story of the heroism of its last lord, Sir Launcelot Dowdall, who, hearing of the issue of the battle of the Boyne and the fate of the monarch to whose religion and politics his family had been so long attached, and fearing the approach of the victorious English army, declared on the news reaching him, that the Prince of Orange should never rest under his ancestral roof. The threat was carried into execution. Dowdall set fire to his castle at nightfall and, crossing the Boyne, sat down upon its opposite bank, from whence, as tradition reports, he beheld the last timber in his noble mansion blazing and flickering in the calm summer’s night, then crash amidst the smouldering ruins; and when its final eructation of smoke and flame was given forth, and the pale light of morning was stealing over that scene of desolation, with an aching and despairing heart he turned from the once happy scene of his youth and manhood, and, flying to the continent, shortly after his royal master, never returned to this country. All that remained of this castle and estate were forfeited in 1700. Many a gallant Irish soldier lost his life, and many a noble Irish gentleman forfeited his broad lands that day. We wish their cause had been a better one, and the monarch for whom they bled more worthy such an honour.’
‘Tradition gives us another, but by no means so probable story about Athlumney Castle, which refers to an earlier date. It is said that two sisters occupied the ancient castles of Athlumney and Blackcastle, which latter was situated on the opposite bank of the river; and the heroine of the latter, jealous of her rival in Athlumney, took the following means of being revenged…’
‘…She made her enter into an agreement, that to prevent their mansions falling into the hands of Cromwell and his soldiers, they should set fire to them at the same moment, as soon as the news of his approach reached them, and that a fire being lighted upon one was to be the signal for the conflagration of the other. In the mean time, the wily mistress of Blackcastle had a quantity of dry brush-wood placed on one of the towers of the castle which, upon a certain night, she lighted; and the inhabitants of Athlumney perceiving the appointed signal, set fire to their mansion and burned it to the ground. In the morning the deception was manifest. Athlumney was a mass of blackened, smoking ruins; while Blackcastle still reared its proud form above the woods, and still afforded shelter to its haughty mistress.’
Extracts from The Beauties of the Boyne, and its Tributary, The Blackwater by Sir William Wilde (1850)
When the present owners bought Fruit Hill, County Wexford some 25 years ago, the house was a roofless shell, having been allowed to fall into dereliction for much of the last century. Long associated with the Glascott family and believed to date from the second quarter of the 18th century, the building is wonderfully idiosyncratic in appearance, from the façade’s pediment containing a Venetian window and flanked by dormer windows, to the ground floor where the fenestration was lowered on one side (the drawing room) but not the other (dining room). The gable-ended main block, its upper portion still carrying evidence of having been weather-slated, is only one room deep but extended at the rear by two wings to form a U-shaped house. The owners have not so much restored Fruit Hill as brought it back from near-death, a task few others would have been sufficiently brave to take on, since little more than the walls – and not even all of those – remained on the site. Their work here is an admirable labour of love and testimony to the fact that no building should be deemed beyond rescue.
The entrance to God’s Acre, a small Quaker graveyard in County Carlow. On the north side of the site is a monument erected by Feilding Lecky Watson in memory of his father and all members of his faith who had settled and lived in the area since the first half of the 17th century. In 1923 Mr Lecky Watson and his family moved to Altamont, some eight miles away (see https://theirishaesthete.com/2018/07/16/altamont-2) where first he and then his daughter Corona North created a spectacular garden. Like the rest of the family, following her death in 1999 she was buried here, her resting place marked by a simple stone.
Two weeks ago, this page showed the present pathetic state of Columb Barracks in Mullingar, County Westmeath (see https://theirishaesthete.com/2020/02/17/mullingar-barracks). Today another former barracks is featured here, this time showing what can be achieved when the task of finding a new purpose for old buildings is approached with sufficient flair and imagination. Dublin’s Clancy Barracks, formerly the Royal Artillery Barracks, was established in its present location on the south side of the river Liffey in 1798 after previous premises in nearby Chapelizod had become too small. Initially the barracks accommodated six officers, 87 non-commissioned officers and men, and eight gunners. In the early 1860s the complex was considerably enlarged so that it could house 18 officers, 589 other men and 435 horses. There was also a veterinary hospital (for the horses) until 1896 when the cavalry moved to another location in the city and this became a general barracks. Handed over to the Free State government in 1922, twenty years later it was renamed after Peadar Clancy, vice-commandant of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA, killed in Dublin Castle during the War of Independence.
When the state decided to dispose of a number of military sites in 1998, Clancy Barracks was on the list of assets to be sold. However, it was not until June 2001 that the barracks and surrounding 13.65 acres of land went out to tender. The property was not to everyone’s taste, as much of it was in a dilapidated condition and there were eight 19th century buildings listed for preservation. In July 2002 Clancy Barracks was sold to a private development company for £25.4 million. Nothing happened (allowing the condition of the buildings to deteriorate further) until three years later when a planning application sought to demolish demolish three-quarters of the existing listed buildings on the site, construct some 900 apartments in 45 blocks and erect a hotel of 15 storeys. Although the local authority gave permission, the scheme was appealed to the planning authority, An Bord Pleanála. It too found the plans acceptable, but then the recession hit and the project stalled, with the former barracks instead being used as a set for a couple of seasons of the BBC 19th century drama Ripper Street. In 2013 the site was bought by an American property investment group Kennedy Wilson for €82.5 million.
When Kennedy Wilson bought what is now called Clancy Quay in 2013, only the first phase of the scheme to redevelop the former barracks had been completed; this comprised some residential 423 units and 36,000 square feet of commercial space. Since then the company has worked to complete the second and third phases with the same mix of residential and commercial use. Phases 2 and 3 includes an 8.5 acre site with planning permission for a mix of residential and commercial use. Although the southern section of the site is still a work in progress, what has been achieved to-date is refreshingly imaginative and attractive; in 2018 architects O’Mahony Pike deservedly won an RIAI Architecture Award for Housing thanks to its work on this project. While sections of the property are given over to blocks of apartments, a large number of the older buildings have been imaginatively reinvented as accommodation, such as three long two-storey ranges in rubble, brick and granite, built in 1862 as workshops, or the fine pedimented former barrack block which had stables on the ground floor and sleeping quarters above. Elsewhere on the development there are a handsome pair of semi-detached early 19th century houses, the former officers’ mess and a range of red-brick blocks that date from the 1940s. The materials used for all these buildings was diverse, and more have been introduced for newer elements on Clancy Quay, but there is a confident coherence to the scheme, helped by generosity of space; the parties behind the development have not greedily tried to cram too much onto the site but instead left ample room between the different blocks, all linked by smart landscaping. There are few such large-scale developments in Dublin, indeed in Ireland, undertaken with this degree of assurance and panache. If and when Mullingar’s Columb Barracks are given new purpose, let’s hope the same high standards are employed there.
The stable block on the former estate of Doory Hall, County Longford. The lands here were granted by Charles II to the Jessop family, said to have moved to this country from Derbyshire. The long-forgotten 19th century writer and novelist George H Jessop (who wrote the libretto for Charles Villiers Stanford’s 1896 comic opera Shamus O’Brien) was born here, together with his sister, poet and story writer Mary Kathleen Jessop Another branch of the same family owned an estate in the same county, Mount Jessop but like Doory Hall this long ago went to ruin.
The main house at Doory Hall, now just a shell, is thought to have been designed in the 1820s by John Hargrave, a son of the successful Cork architect Abraham Hargrave; the younger man was responsible for designing a number of buildings, including churches and glebe houses, in County Longford. The stable block is also attributed to him, but could be earlier; the 1820s house replaced an earlier one on the site, so perhaps this is a residue of the previous development? Whatever the past history, at the moment its future does not look promising.
Beginning in the early 1970s, every summer social geographer Kevin Corrigan Kearns visited Ireland for research purposes, spending considerable amounts of time in Dublin. In 1983 he published a book Georgian Dublin: Ireland’s Imperilled Architectural Heritage in which he wrote that with each trip to the city, ‘I could not help but witness the insidious forces which seemed to conspire against the vulnerable Georgian streetscapes. Every year there was grim new testimony to neglect, decay and destruction. Once-intact Georgian vistas of unsurpassed beauty were savaged by demolition and unsympathetic architectural infill. Inexplicably, there existed no effective opposition to this wilful and wanton assault on Dublin’s unique urban core. Indeed, I sensed that Dubliners somehow accepting this alarming degenerative process as a sort of natural occurrence – ostensibly, all in the name of progress and prosperity. Were Dubliners insensitive to this loss or merely impotent to exert any control over the destiny of their elegant city? Was there no philosophy of stewardship on the part of officialdom and citizenry to preserve this imperilled treasure for future generations?… While much destruction has incontestably resulted from deliberate unabashed rape of the cityscape, a wealth of Georgiana has conspicuously been despoiled and lost from simple benign neglect on the part of owners and occupiers, both public and private. The fragile state of Georgian Dublin today cannot be attributed to the actions of any single group. A myriad of forces has for generations militated against the welfare and survival of the Georgian city.’
Although he had suggested a ‘myriad of forces’ was responsible for the havoc wreaked on Ireland’s historic capital during the 1870s and ‘80s, Kevin Corrigan Kearns had no doubt who were the principal villains: ‘It would not be an exaggeration to state that the redevelopment of Dublin has essentially been left to the whims and dictates of private developers and speculators. For the past twenty years, amid an unconstrained environment for development, they have been allowed to use the inner city, in the words of one irate writer to the Irish Times, as a “gambling ground for their own ambitions of wealth and power”. During this free-wheeling period of urban growth, the government assumed a modest role in redevelopment. Indeed, while the Civil Service and other public bodies taken up almost three-quarters of Dublin’s total office space, the vast bulk of this accommodation is rented from private development companies.
By the late ‘sixties, the appellation “developer” had become synonymous with “despoiler” in the public psyche. The tide of destruction that scarred the central city evoked accusations of “rape”, “pillage” and “prostitution” of the urban environment. The developers’ appetite for reconstruction and profit seemed rapacious as they increasingly cast hungry eyes towards the Georgian terraces. Motivated by hard economics which demanded maximum floor space for minimal investment, no Georgian house, regardless of its historic or artistic merit, was sacrosanct.’
Kevin Corrigan Kearns was by no means the only person watching the destruction of Dublin’s historic core with dismay; artist and author Peter Pearson was likewise appalled by what was taking place in his native city. Rather than observe, he began to intervene by rescuing items from buildings that were being demo
lished or cleared out, and gradually built up a huge collection of architectural salvage. Today that collection acts as a record of decades’ long barbarianism. Pearson’s accumulated items include everything from fragments of 18th century plasterwork to 19th century decorative iron railings, from carved Portland stone capitals to ornamental door knockers. Among the features they share is that all came from properties in the capital, and all were deemed expendable and of no value: nobody operating in an official capacity thought it worthwhile to preserve a record of what was being torn down. Instead, this work was left to a passionate individual who recognised what neither the state nor Dublin County Council did: that the rampant and ill-conceived razing of the city centre would lead to a collective loss of memory unless something was saved. Without Pearson’s diligent enterprise, it would all have disappeared, a handful of old black and white photographs being the only souvenir.
Today it is less likely that buildings constructed in earlier centuries will be knocked down – although this can still occur, not least because of an inadequate listing of properties that merit protection (such as those which are currently at risk on the corner of Nassau and Kildare Streets. Dating from c.1820, astonishingly they are unlisted by Dublin City Council, thereby allowing the owner to apply for their demolition and replacement with an office development). And even buildings which are listed for preservation frequently suffer from unauthorised work on the site, as anyone who has ventured onto Capel Street and its neighbours in recent years can testify: large skips are heaped with the remains of gutted interiors. Across the capital, developers continue to be permitted set the pace for what is and isn’t built or preserved. Both central and local authorities continue to adopt a largely laissez-faire, hands-off approach to what is kept within the historic core. There is no national collection of the kind created over several decades by Peter Pearson. To see what he saved is both wonderful and tragic. Anyone involved in planning and urban development should be under an obligation to spend ample time looking through what was rescued in order that the same mistakes are not repeated. Otherwise the record of losses will continue to grow.
Dublin Fragments: The Pearson Collection is on show in the Irish Georgian Society, City Assembly House, 58 South William Street, Dublin 2 until March 22nd, and includes a selling exhibition of paintings and collages of the city by Peter Pearson.
As David Skinner explains in his 2014 monograph on Wallpaper in Ireland, in the early 19th century some French manufacturers began to produce narrative papers, each one different and intended to be hung in sequence so as to tell a story. These ‘papiers-peints paysages’ as they were called, became popular throughour Europe and North America, and a number of them were hung in Irish houses. One particular monochrome set, telling the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche was first created in 1816 by Joseph Dufour of Paris, based on a series of pictures specially produced by two neo-classical artists of the time, Louis Lafitte and Merry-Joseph Blondel. At least three Cupid and Psyche sets could once be found here but two of the houses where they were installed, Kinlough, County Leitrim and Piltown, County Louth, are now ruins (for the latter, see https://theirishaesthete.com/2017/03/13/pourquoi-me-reveiller). The third set remains in situ in the library/ballroom of Stradbally Hall, County Laois where in the 1860s it was placed not on the walls but rather unusually in sequence around the outer perimeter of the ceiling.
