Tag Archives: County Limerick

Commemorating the Living



Rather unusually, this monument was erected while the person to whom it paid honour was still very much alive. In 1829, the Barrington family decided to put up a free-standing limestone column in Limerick city celebrating its popular MP, Thomas Spring Rice, future first Lord Monteagle (he would only die in 1866). On a plain limestone ashlar cylindrical base approached by three steps, the fluted Doric column designed by Henry Aaron Baker carries a statue carved by Thomas KIrk (also responsible for the figure of Admiral Nelson that once stood atop his own column in Dublin) showing the subject dressed in robes and looking towards a terrace of six houses, the only part of the scheme for a splendid square in this part of Limerick that was completed as intended in the 1830s.



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A Funeral is Passing


‘It is curious to observe how customs and ceremonies degenerate. The present Irish cry, or howl, cannot boast of such melody, nor is the funeral procession conducted with much dignity. The crowd of people who assemble at these funerals sometimes amounts to a thousand, often to four or five hundred. They gather as the bearers of the hearse proceed on their way, and when they pass through any village, or when they come near any houses, they begin to cry—Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Agh! Agh! raising their notes from the first OH! to the last AGH! in a kind of mournful howl. This gives notice to the inhabitants of the village that a FUNERAL IS PASSING and immediately they flock out to follow it. In the province of Munster it is a common thing for the women to follow a funeral, to join in the universal cry with all their might and main for some time, and then to turn and ask—”Arrah! Who is it that’s dead?—who is it we’re crying for?” Even the poorest people have their own burying-places—that is, spots of ground in the churchyards where they say that their ancestors have been buried ever since the wars of Ireland; and if these burial-places are ten miles from the place where a man dies, his friends and neighbours take care to carry his corpse thither. Always one priest, often five or six priests, attend these funerals; each priest repeats a mass, for which he is paid, sometimes a shilling, sometimes half a crown, sometimes half a guinea, or a guinea, according to their circumstances, or, as they say, according to the ability of the deceased. After the burial of any very poor man, who has left a widow or children, the priest makes what is called a COLLECTION for the widow; he goes round to every person present, and each contributes sixpence or a shilling, or what they please. The reader will find in the note upon the word WAKE, more particulars respecting the conclusion of the Irish funerals.’





‘Certain old women, who cry particularly loud and well, are in great request, and, as a man said to the Editor, “Every one would wish and be proud to have such at his funeral, or at that of his friends.” The lower Irish are wonderfully eager to attend the funerals of their friends and relations, and they make their relationships branch out to a great extent. The proof that a poor man has been well beloved during his life is his having a crowded funeral. To attend a neighbour’s funeral is a cheap proof of humanity, but it does not, as some imagine, cost nothing. The time spent in attending funerals may be safely valued at half a million to the Irish nation; the Editor thinks that double that sum would not be too high an estimate. The habits of profligacy and drunkenness which are acquired at WAKES are here put out of the question. When a labourer, a carpenter, or a smith, is not at his work, which frequently happens, ask where he is gone, and ten to one the answer is—”Oh, faith, please your honour, he couldn’t do a stroke to-day, for he’s gone to THE funeral.” Even beggars, when they grow old, go about begging FOR THEIR OWN FUNERALS that is, begging for money to buy a coffin, candles, pipes, and tobacco.’





‘Those who value customs in proportion to their antiquity, and nations in proportion to their adherence to ancient customs, will doubtless admire the Irish ULLALOO, and the Irish nation, for persevering in this usage from time immemorial. The Editor, however, has observed some alarming symptoms, which seem to prognosticate the declining taste for the Ullaloo in Ireland. In a comic theatrical entertainment, represented not long since on the Dublin stage, a chorus of old women was introduced, who set up the Irish howl round the relics of a physician, who is supposed to have fallen under the wooden sword of Harlequin. After the old women have continued their Ullaloo for a decent time, with all the necessary accompaniments of wringing their hands, wiping or rubbing their eyes with the corners of their gowns or aprons, etc., one of the mourners suddenly suspends her lamentable cries, and, turning to her neighbour, asks, “Arrah now, honey, who is it we’re crying for?”’


Extracts from Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth (1800)
Photographs of a graveyard in Ballingarry, County Limerick
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Clients of God



Díseart Aonghasa, or Dísert Óengusa, was founded in 780 by Saint Óengus of Tallaght. The monastery was associated with the Céile Dé or Culdees (meaning client of God), an early Christian ascetic movement. Today the site comprises the remains of a multi-period church, a round tower and a graveyard, all originally surrounded by a stone enclosure. Much altered over the centuries, the first of these was used as a parish church until 1418, while the graveyard ceased to be used after 1868. Although now incomplete and missing its conical cap, the limestone round tower still rises 20.65 metres and five storeys. Dating from the 11th/12th centuries, it has three windows as well as a doorway on the first level with carved sandstone used for their dressings.



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Pathetic Residue




A gate lodge, almost all that remains of Ballywilliam, a former estate in County Limerick owned by the Maunsell family from the mid-18th century onwards. The main house here has long gone but this pathetic residue serves as a memory of what was once here. In his guide to the lodges of Munster, J.A.K. Dean ascribes the building’s design to Charles Frederick Anderson, and suggests a date after 1824 when Ballywilliam was inherited by George Meares Maunsell. A wonderful example of neo-classical design, the building has a pedimented breakfront supported by Doric columns, all in crisp cut limestone. Flanked by a curtain wall, pedimented projections extend the single-storey lodge to accommodate three rooms, that in the centre having a brick-vaulted ceiling, the floor below now covered in detritus.




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A Glebe House and a Castle



After last Monday’s post about the former 19th century rectory outside Rathkeale, County Limerick (see A Glebe House and a Castle « The Irish Aesthete) here are some images of its predecessor, located to the immediate west of Holy Trinity Church and to the south of the river Deel, on the outskirts of the town. A four-storey, late-medieval tower house, the building is now called Glebe Castle, thereby indicating its original function which presumably it retained until the new clerical residence was constructed in 1819. But seemingly it was also known as Chancellor’s Castle, since the rector of Rathkeale was also Chancellor of the Diocese of Limerick. By the time that Samuel Lewis published his Topographical Survey of Ireland in 1837, Glebe Castle had become home to the Rev. CT Coghlan, rector of the neighbouring parish of Kilscannel. At some unknown date, a single-storey block was added to east side of the castle, but more recently the present house has been built here. 



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First Fruits



Glebe: land granted to a member of the clergy as part of a benefice. Etymology: derives from the Middle English word ‘glebe’, which in turn came from the Old French ‘glèbe’, and ultimately from the Latin word ‘gleba’ or ‘glaeba’, meaning ‘clod of earth’ or ‘soil’.
As indicated above, glebes were parcels of land provided for members of the clergy within the parish for which they were responsible. And, in the post-Reformation period, clergymen of the Established Church were supposed to be provided with suitable residences on that land. However, for various reasons, not least lay impropriations of former church property during the upheavals of the late 16th and 17th centuries, by 1700 many parishes suffered from a want of glebe land and glebe houses alike. In consequence, they were unable to support a resident clergyman. In order to have an adequate income, some clerics came to hold a number of benefices, but only reside in one of them, leading to inevitable neglect of the others and to complaints that parishes (and parishioners) were suffering from a want of attention. In 1693 Bishop Dopping of Meath suggested one reason for widespread clerical non-residence lay in ‘the want of Gleabs in some places, and in all the decay of manse houses by the frequent Warrs in the Kingdome.’ Similarly, in 1720 Bishop Henry Downes of Elphin wrote that there was only one clerical residence within his diocese, and that was occupied by the dean. As a result, he declared, clergymen who wanted to live within their parishes, ‘generally take little Farms that they may have within themselves all Necessarys…they for ye most part want Glebes to build on, what they had of yt kind being very much swallowed up in Connaught during ye times of Rebellion & Confusion.’ 





By the start of the 18th century, the pitiful plight of the Established Church in Ireland, especially the poor state of its churches and clerical residences, led to the establishment by government in 1711 of the Board of First Fruits; its equivalent in England, set up seven years earlier, was known as Queen Anne’s Bounty. The board directed that the first fruits or ‘annates’ – that is the first year’s income of a clergyman occupying a new position – were paid into a fund which was then used to build or restore churches and glebe houses, as well as purchase appropriate glebe lands. During the first 70 years of its existence, the board purchased glebe lands for benefices around the country at a total cost of £3,543. In addition, it assisted the building of forty-five glebe houses with gifts of £4,080. These figures greatly increased from 1791 thanks to annual parliamentary grants. Over the following 12 years, the Board of First Fruits spent £55,600 on building 88 churches and 116 glebe houses. The sums grew larger in the decades following the Act of Union and further government grants: in total, £807,648 was provided to purchase glebe lands in 193 benefices, with the construction of 550 glebe houses, and building, rebuilding or enlargement of 697 churches. By 1832 some 829 glebe houses had been built across Ireland, but this activity came largely to a halt the following year with the passing of the Church Temporalities Act, which led to the functions and income of the Board of First Fruits being passed to a new body, the Board of Ecclesiastical Commissioners. 





Today’s pictures show the former glebe house of the parish of Rathkeale, County Limerick. In his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837), Samuel Lewis advised that the building had been constructed in 1819 ‘by aid of a gift of £100, and a loan of £1500 from the late Board of First Fruits.’ Furthermore, the glebe lands ran to 10 acres, half of them attached to the glebe house, the other half adjoining an earlier clerical residence closer to the centre of the town. The glebe house’s first occupant was Charles Warburton, Rector of Rathkeale, as well as Chancellor of the Diocese of Limerick (and indeed, Rector of Clonmel, County Tipperary). Warburton’s family background is curious. His paternal grandfather, Dominic Mungan (1715-1774) was a famous blind harpist from County Tyrone. The youngest of Mungan’s three sons, Terence Mongan, originally trained to become a Roman Catholic priest but appears to have converted to the Anglican faith after being appointed a chaplain of the 62nd Regiment of Foot in the British army during the American War of Independence. Changing his name to Charles Mongan, he subsequently married a well-connected New Yorker Frances Marston, with whom he had four sons. The couple and their children returned to Ireland in 1786 where Mongan, who adopted the surname Warburton by royal licence in 1792, enjoyed rapid promotion within the Established Church, serving as Dean of Ardagh and then Clonmacnoise before being appointed Bishop of Limerick in 1806. He would be translated to Cloyne in 1820, dying in office six years later. It was his third son, likewise called Charles, born in New York in 1780, who was the first resident of the new Rathkeale glebe house, a handsome square block of two storeys over basement, with a three-bay east-facing facade, the central doorcase having fan and sidelights. The property also has adjacent yards, with coach houses and stabling for eight horses, as well as a walled garden running to more than an acre. The original 19th century Ordnance Survey map shows that there were once two gate lodges, one to the north, the other to the east, but are now lost. Internally, the house conforms to what would be expected of a rural residence of the period, the most striking decorative feature being the staircase hall, divided into two parts by a screen of Ionic columns. Long since sold by the Church of Ireland, the former glebe house is privately owned and much cherished by its current proprietor.



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The Tomb of the Unknown Family



Today being Hallow’een, here are some rather dejected looking family mausolea in the graveyard of St Mary’s, Croom, County Limerick. One or two of them can be identified, an example being that carrying the notification, ‘This Vault was erected by Denis Lyons Esqr in Memory of his Eldest Son, and as a Burial Place of the Family, AD 1802.’ Another carries the motto ‘Fortes fortuna juvat’ (Fortune favours the Brave), along with the name of Dickson and the date 1806. The families whose remains were interred in several others, however, are no longer known and they are gradually sliding into ruin.


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Something of a Rarity



Originally from Yorkshire, in 1657 Montifort Westropp settled in Limerick city and three years later was comptroller of the port there. Subsequently he purchased various parcels of land in Co. Clare where he held the office of High Sheriff in 1674 and 1690, as well as being appointed a Commissioner for the county by an Act of Irish Parliament in 1697. Following his death the following year, several of his sons continued to prosper: one son, also called Montifort – a forebear of the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp – purchased the Attyflin estate near Patrickswell, County Limerick from the Chichester House Commissioners in 1703, and the same year, another son, Thomas Westropp bought an estate in the same county at Ballysteen. Some kind of castle or tower house evidently stood here, but it was replaced by the present building in the last quarter of the 18th century, perhaps by the original Thomas’s grandson (also called Thomas) who died in 1789.





Following Thomas Westropp’s death in 1789, the Ballysteen estate was inherited by his only surviving son, General John Westropp. However, when he died in 1825 without issue, Ballysteen reverted to one of the children of his sister Sara who in 1775 had married Colonel Thomas Odell of Ballingarry, County Limerick. The couple’s third son, Edmond, duly inherited his uncle’s estate and changed his name to Westropp. His grandson Edward also had no son but two daughters, one of whom, Elizabeth, in 1942 married Maurice Talbot, son of the Dean of Cashel and himself, from 1954, Dean of Limerick. Ballysteen was in due course inherited by the present generation of the family who have, for the first time in its history, offered the property for sale. 





As seen today, Ballysteen is a two-storey, five-bay house, with east-facing rendered facade and a west-facing, four-bay garden front, as well as lower two-storey wings on either side of the main block. Internally, the house appears to have been last undergone alterations around 1820, or perhaps soon after 1825 when it was inherited by Edmond Odell Westropp. To the front, much of the space is taken up by a substantial, three-bay entrance hall, with the staircase in an adjacent area to the immediate north. Behind the entrance are the two principal reception rooms, drawing and dining, and all three have white marble chimneypieces typical of the late-18th/early 19th century. They also retain some mahogany furniture from the same period: the dining room, for example, has a pair of arched niches each of which holds an identical buffet with slender spiral twist legs, while the entrance hall has a pair of bookcases with similar decorative detail, suggesting they all came from the same workshop at the same time. A sitting room/library is accommodated in the south wing while the kitchen, pantry, scullery and so forth, together with the service staircase, can be found in its northern equivalent. Upstairs are six bedrooms, some with dressing rooms. Thanks to being left unaltered for so long, Ballysteen retains the appearance and character of an Irish country house once widespread but today something of a rarity. One must hope that whoever is fortunate to acquire the property, while updating some of the facilities, retains that wonderful character. It is too precious to lose.



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The Heavy Hand is Uppermost




After last Friday’s text about the Massy mausoleum in the graveyard of Ardagh, County Limerick (Blessed are the Dead « The Irish Aesthete), here is another such monument in the same site. In this instance, it commemorates William Smith O’Brien, one of the key figures in the Young Ireland movement who, following a failed armed uprising in 1848, was transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), although pardoned and permitted to return to his native country in 1856. Erected the year after O’Brien’s death in 1864, the mausoleum was designed by Limerick-born architect William Fogerty in the Hiberno-Romanesque style. It contains the remains not just of O’Brien but also his wife Lucy Caroline Gabbett, who predeceased him, and the couple’s eldest son Edward William O’Brien, described on an inscription  as “A Just Man, Lover of His People.” Above the cast-iron panelled door can be seen the O’Brien coat of arms carved in sandstone. The chevron pattern mouldings above the door are supported by Connemara marble columns, and note how the outermost limestone arch concludes in balls of shamrocks. Inside the tympanum is O’Brien’s motto,  ‘Is laidir an lamh in uachtair’ (The heavy hand is uppermost) Sandstone and limestone are also employed in alternate bands around the rest of the building, with a series of blind arches on three sides.




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Blessed are the Dead



Following last Monday’s entry about Glenville, County Limerick, here in a nearby graveyard is the Massy Mausoleum, dating from 1864 although Eyre Massy, whose remains it holds, only died five years later. The limestone mausoleum also contains the remains of Charles Massy, who had emigrated to Australia (where his descendants still live). On the south side, below the Massy coat of arms, is a sarcophagus in raised relief on which is inscribed a quotation from the Book of Revelation, ‘Blessed are the dead which die in Christ/from henceforth yea saith the Spirit/That they may rest from their labours/and their works do follow them.’


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