A Grand Gateway


One of a number of gateways providing access to the four-acre walled garden at Barmeath Castle, County Louth. A map dating from the mid-1770s and drawn up by the surveyor Charles Frizell shows this area of the demesne to be a shrubbery with no evidence of enclosure, indicating the walled garden, like so many others, was only created in the late 18th or early 19th centuries. Unusually, all the walls are lined in brick, whereas, as a rule, it was only the south-facing wall that received this treatment since brick retains the heat longer than does stone. The entrances are also distinguished by being given rather grand, pedimented, breakfront gateways. The walled garden here has been restored in recent years and is now open to the public. Readers with no interest in matters horticultural should be warned that the Irish Aesthete is at present curating an exhibition devoted to the history of the Irish country house garden (opening at the Irish Georgian Society’s headquarters, the City Assembly House in Dublin on May 19th) and therefore this subject is likely to feature heavily in the coming weeks.

Barmeath


Home to the Bellew family for several, this is Barmeath Castle, County Louth. The core of the building is a late medieval tower house built by the Moores who previously owned the land on which it stands. A two-storey wing was added to this around 1700 and then towards the middle of the 18th century a large plain block constructed, of three storeys and seven bays. However, changing tastes meant that in the 1830s the first Lord Bellew commissioned Hertfordshire architect, Thomas Smith, to transform the building into a neo-Norman castle with ample crenellations and fat round corner turrets, as well as the addition of a great square tower at one end, this now becoming the main entrance. Despite this elaborate make-over, it is still possible to detect the more straightforward Georgian house on what then became the garden front.