Tag Archives: Georgian Architecture

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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Glenville House


In 1763 John Massy, who served as Treasurer of Limerick, bought an estate in the county called Glenville. John was the great-grandson of Hugh Massy, an English soldier who had come to Ireland during the Confederate War period and afterwards settled in this part of the country, being granted land at Duntrileague: when Burke’s Peerage first appeared in the 19th century, the Massys – several of whom had by then being granted titles – claimed descent from one Hamon de Massy who, seemingly, had accompanied William the Conqueror to England in 1066. Be that as it may, the family now firmly established themselves in County Limerick, intermarrying with other landed dynasties and with sundry younger sons becoming either Church of Ireland clergymen or soldiers: a cousin of John Massy, General Eyre Massey (for unknown reasons, he spelt his surname differently to other branches of the family) as a result of his distinguished military career was created Baron Clarina of Elm Park in 1800. And among the next generation of the family to live at Glenville, several sons of William Massy and his wife Ann Creagh – the couple would have no less than 23 children – served as clergymen and soldiers. Given the extraordinary number of offspring, it is hardly surprising that in the early 19th century the house was enlarged. 





From among the many children of William and Ann Massy, one of their sons John, again a Captain in the British army – inherited Glenville and lived there until his death in 1846. The property then passed to his son William but he opted to sell it to his uncle, Eyre Massy (another of William and Ann’s children). After he died in 1869, Glenville passed to his son, Jonathan Bruce Massy who, bucking the family trend for large families, had only two daughters. When he died in 1903, Glenville was left not to one of these two women, but to a nephew, Henry Eyre Massy, who lived in Australia. Seven years later, he sold the estate back to his uncle’s elder daughter, Frances who had married Thomas Crawford Coplen-Langford the same year as her father’s death but had then been widowed just a couple of years later: curiously, Thomas’s elder brother Richard also married a member of the Massy family. Meanwhile, his widow Frances, having bought Glenville in 1912, remained there until her death in 1956. The house was then occupied by Langford relatives until bought some years ago by the present owners who have since undertaken extensive work on the property.





Above a former carriage house in the yard to the rear of Glenville, a keystone carries the information ‘WM/AD/1803’ but at least part of the building is older than this date. What is now a wing to the right of the main block is probably the original residence here, a late 17th/early 18th century long house, one room deep and of two storeys. Evidently, given the size of William and Ann Massy’s family, this structure was insufficient, hence the addition of 1803. Below wide eaves, the south-facing new house, of coarse-dressed limestone and two storeys, has three bays with a central breakfront, the ground-floor door flanked by side lights. Internally, the layout follows a customary tripartite plan, dining room to one side of the entrance hall and drawing room to the other. The former has a Kilkenny marble chimneypiece, the latter one of white marble. Returning to the hall, there are two doors facing the entrance, with a fanlight between them. That to the right is blind, while that to the left gives access to a staircase leading to the first floor (and lit by the aforementioned fanlight). Behind the house is a generous yard, which has been partially restored by the present owners. This in turn opens into a substantial walled garden. Glenville is significant because it is an example of a gentry residence from the late Georgian period, similar in style to aristocratic country houses but built and decorated on a more modest scale. As the gentry class has disappeared in this country, so too have many of their properties, which makes the survival of Glenville all the more cheering.  


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Another Gratifying Example



Following the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Captain George Pepper was confirmed by the crown in ownership of Ballygarth Castle, County Meath, a property that had hitherto belonged to the Netterville family. However, by the second half of the 18th century, one branch of the Peppers had settled in County Offaly where, in 1777 they commissioned a new residence called Loughton. Facing north across sweeping parkland, as originally constructed, the house had its entrance located in a central canted bay with two bays on either side, and probably looking not unlike Newhall, County Clare (see New Blood for New Hall « The Irish Aesthete). It served as home to Thomas Ryder Pepper until killed in a hunting accident in 1828. Having no direct heir, he directed that Loughton be left to his brother-in-law, Lt-General Benjamin Bloomfield, who had been created Baron Bloomfield three years before. After a distinguished career in the army, Bloomfield had entered royal service, acting as an Aide-de-Camp, then Chief Equerry and Clerak Marshall to the Prince of Wales, before becoming Private Secretary to George IV, as well as Keeper of the Privy Purse and Receiver of the Duchy of Cornwall from 1817-22. It was in his role as Keeper of the Privy Purse that he ran into trouble, since Bloomfield attempted to curb the monarch’s notorious extravagance, thereby not only incurring the latter’s wrath but also that of Lady Conyngham, George IV’s mistress and a frequent beneficiary of his largesse: once a great friend of the king, Bloomfield was ignominiously removed from his positions in 1822. 





Following the first Lord Bloomfield’s death in 1846, Loughton was inherited by his only son, John, second baron and diplomat who began his career in 1824 acting as an attaché in Lisbon. In 1851 he was appointed ambassador to Berlin and from thence to Vienna in 1860, eventually retiring 11 years later. When he died in 1879, he left no legitimate heir, although while posted to Stockholm in 1826 he had at least one child with Swedish actress Emilie Högquist, later mistress of King Oscar I. The Loughton estate then passed to Benjamin Bloomfield Trench, whose mother Georgiana had been a sister of the second Lord Bloomfield: the Trenches lived not far away at Cangort Park (see A Work in Progress « The Irish Aesthete). Benjamin Bloomfield Trench and his wife Dora had two daughters, and following their deaths, Loughton passed once again to another relation, Major Anthony Guy Atkinson, whose family for many generations had also lived in the area at Cangort House (see A Feast of Colour and Light « The Irish Aesthete). His son would sell Loughton in 2001 to Dr James Reilly, former Minister for Health who, in turn, sold the property to its present owners in 2016. 





As seen today, Loughton shows the results of a radical remodelling and enlargement of the house undertaken by architect James Pain in the mid-1830s for the first Lord Bloomfield. On the exterior, the entrance was moved from the north front’s canted bow to a new single-storey extension on the east side, leaving a rather sober rendered facade of three storeys over basement, tall, plain and relieved only by the windows’ limestone dressings. The eight-bay, south-facing garden front is altogether more immediately engaging, reversing the plan on the north side so that full-height canted bays flank a central two-bay recess, the window treatments also more dressed with details such as pediments and entablatures on console brackets. One curious feature is that the heights of the windows in the two central bays have not been raised to match those on either side, thereby disrupting the lines. The enfilade of principal reception rooms lies immediately behind this front, the drawing room leading to the library and thence the dining room. Immediately behind the library, Pain cleverly used the canted bow former entrance as a hall, its cantilevered stone staircase snaking around the walls to the main bedrooms immediately above. The most important of these formerly contained a richly carved bed made in 1821 in expectation of a visit to the house by George IV: the king never came to Loughton but the bed remained in situ until very regrettably sold at auction in 2016. Meanwhile, off the staircase hall can be found the former billiard room which acquired its present decoration of inlaid doors and window shutters, as well as a Tudor Revival chimneypiece, around 1890 seemingly thanks to Dora, wife of Benjamin Bloomfield Trench. Since acquiring the property nine years ago, when all the contents were sold, the current owners have been working both to refurbish and refurnish Loughton, an arduous task given the size of the place. Nevertheless, given how much has already been achieved here, their ambitions seem perfectly achievable. This is another gratifying example of what can be done to ensure Ireland’s historic houses have a viable future. 



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A Good Showish Figure



To the immediate east of St Macartan’s Cathedral in Clogher, County Tyrone stands the former bishop’s palace which was likewise rebuilt in the early 18th century by the Rev Dr John Stearne. Mrs Delany visited the place in August 1748 when it was occupied by Stearne’s successor, Robert Clayton and his wife, and while she thought the garden  ‘pretty with a fine large sloping green walk from the steps to a large basin on water, on which sail most gracefully fair beautiful swans,’ she was less satisfied with the house, describing it as ‘large, and makes a good showish figure; but great loss of room by ill-contrivance within doors. It is situated on the side of so steep a hill that part of the front next the street is under ground and from that to the garden you descend fifty stone steps which is intolerable.’ In consequence, while the seven-bay entrance front is of three storeys, the six-bay garden front is of four storeys. As seen today, the old palace is the result of work undertaken here by Lord John George Beresford, bishop in 1819-20 and then Lord Robert Tottenham. Following the union of the diocese of Clogher with the archdiocese of Armagh in 1850, the property was sold and became a private residence. The interiors are rather plain, the most striking feature being the staircase, the ceiling of which is painted with six cherubs: these represented the children of Thomas Stewart Porter who inherited what was then called Clogher Park in 1903. The house subsequently became a convent for the Sisters of St Louis, but is now a residential care home.



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In the Ancient Style


One of the lesser-known figures in early 18th century Irish cultural life is the Rev John Stearne, successively Dean of St Patrick’s, Dublin, then Bishop of Dromore and finally Bishop of Clogher. Born in 1660, he was the son of another John Stearne, Professor of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin and founder of what would become the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. In 1705 the younger Stearne succeeded his mother’s kinsman Jerome Ryves as Dean of St Patrick’s where he rebuilt the deanery (a house that would be destroyed by fire in 1781), the first of several such projects he undertook. The next came following his elevation in 1713 to the Bishopric of Dromore where he inherited an incomplete episcopal palace at Magheralin from his predecessor, Tobias Pullen. The latter had spent some residence which Stearne further extended and finished at a cost of more than £333: this building is also, alas, no more. Then, following his translation to Clogher, he is recorded by his near contemporary Walter Harris as having spent £3,000 ‘in building and other improvements.’  A considerable amount of the money is likely to have gone towards a new cathedral, commissioned by Stearne only a year before his death in 1744. 





A bachelor, Bishop Stearne was an ardent bibliophile, one of the keenest book collectors of his generation. In June 1713 he informed his friend William King, Archbishop of Dublin (another great book collector) that he sought a remedy for ‘that disease which inclines men to buy more books than they can have much use for.’ Even while he was Dean of St Patrick’s, his fondness for acquiring volumes had been noted in verses by William Percival, Dean of Emly, who wrote:
‘Near St Sepulchre’s stands a building
Which, as report goes, ne’er had child in;
The house is large, and to adorn her,
From garret down to chimney corner,
The upper chambers were well lined
With antique books, and books new coined;
Which plainly shewed its founder’s head
With learning of all sorts supplied…’*
His collection would become a useful resource for many scholars, not least the aforementioned Walter Harris who, in the preface to his updating of Sir James Ware’s writings, gratefully noted that the bishop ‘gave me free leave to make Extracts out of his valuable Collections relating to Ireland.’ In June 1738, John Copping, newly appointed Dean of Clogher told Sir Hans Sloane that Stearne, then aged 78, ‘carries in him a magazine of knowledge, unimpaired by his great age, with a constitution of body which I dare not match. An easy temper, with an engaging affability makes his house the constant resort of all the learned and polite world, and as he is a bachelor, you will not wonder that his hospitable doors are open to the ladies.’ Copping added that the bishop was as communicative as he was knowing. ‘His study is large, containing I believe 6 or 7000 volumes, among which are some curious pieces, and I believe there is nothing in his collection with which he is not intimately acquainted.’ Five years earlier, Stearne had donated £1,000 to his alma mater Trinity College Dublin for the construction of a printing house (designed by Richard Castle) and two years later gave a further £200 for the purchase of block types used in printing. It might have been expected therefore that following his death he would leave his library, which he had long regarded as ‘a resource for others’, to the college where he had long served as vice-chancellor. Instead, he opted to divide the collection between different institutions, TCD having already received in 1741 the collection of depositions relating to the 1641 rebellion, which Stearne had bought from the widow of Dr John Madden. Over 2,000 works from his collection to the library established more than forty years earlier by Narcissus Marsh, declaring in his will that this was but ‘a small token of the great regard I have for the bountiful erector and endower of this Library.’ By the terms of his will, he endowed a number of charities, including Dr Stevens’ Hospital and St Patrick’s Hospital (established by his old friend, Jonathan Swift), as well as leaving funds for the completion of the cathedral which was then under construction at Clogher. 





Located on a rise above the village, the cathedral at Clogher has always sat within the walls of what was once a Celtic hill-fort. As a religious settlement, the building is said to owe its origins to St Macartan, a companion of St Patrick, who c.493 founded a monastery here. In 1111, at the reforming Synod of Ráth Breasail, Clogher was established as a diocese, its boundaries roughly conforming to those of the medieval Kingdom of Airgíalla, although for a period during the 12th century its centre was moved to Louth. Nothing survives of the original cathedral. Dedicated to St Macartan, it was rebuilt c.1183 and then again in c.1295, before the entire site was severely damaged in two fires in the years 1395 and 1396. Further damage was inflicted on several occasions during the upheavals of the 16th century, so that by the time James Spottiswood was appointed bishop in 1621, he found the cathedral church ‘altogether ruynous. The walls of an Abbey church standeth by, which will beare no roofe.’ Although he undertook extensive restoration works, these suffered again over the course of the Confederate Wars and their aftermath, and it was only in the early 18th century that this part of the country experienced sufficient peace for John Stearne to undertake the construction of a new cathedral, although in doing so, almost all evidence of earlier buildings here were cleared. Stearne’s architect is believed to have been the builder/architect James Martin, about whom little is known except that he died almost the same time as did the bishop. Although quite clearly a classical structure, the building was described at the time as being ‘in the ancient style of English architecture.’ As explained by Peter Galloway in The Cathedrals of Ireland (1992) this clearly does not suggest the latest iteration of St Macartan’s was an early example of the Gothic revival, but rather that it had a cruciform plan ‘which was a notable move away from the hall-and-tower type of church in standard design in the late 17th century.’ In 1816-18, alterations ‘in the Grecian style’ were made to the cathedral by the then-dean, Richard Bagwell, the most obvious instance of which was the addition of an open stonework balustrade with obelisk finials around the top of the tower at the west end. Internally, further changes took place in 1865 when the galleries along the south and north sides were removed, so that only that on the west side, accommodating the organ, can be found today. The interior of the building is relatively plain, relieved by a variety of memorials between round-headed windows, most of which have been filled with stained glass: the Venetian east window has Ionic columns and pilasters and commemorates Lord John George Beresford, Bishop of Clogher 1819-20. Still well-maintained by the local community, St Macartan’s is perhaps not the most engaging cathedral in Ireland: one wonders what might have been its final appearance had both John Stearne and James Martin lived to see the work completed. 


*Patrick Delany, Dean of Down, also wrote a verse, Written on a Window, at the Deanery House, St Patrick’s, in which he mentioned the genial hospitality provided there by both Stearne and his successor Jonathan Swift.
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Upon Entry



After Monday’s post about the main house at Woodbrook, County Laois, here are the the south gate lodge and gate screen into the estate. The lodge itself is a curious structure which may, or may not, have been designed by James Shiel at the same time as he was coming up with proposals for the house. The facade is dominated by an substantial ashlar pediment with window beneath, the latter flanked by deep recesses, one of which has a door into the building. So generous are the recesses that the pediment has to be supported by a pair of slender iron columns. The gate screen itself, of limestone ashlar and wrought iron, is more standardised with its piers, quadrant walls and arched niches in the outer sections. Here also is an old milestone advising that Dublin lies 47 miles distant.



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Making A Swift Connection



The name Woodbrook has been given to a number of houses in different parts of Ireland, and the natural assumption would be that it derives from the property having once had a brook in woodland. In the case of Woodbrook, County Laois, however, it combines the second syllable of original owner Knightley Chetwood’s surname along with the first syllable of that of his wife Hester Brooking: hence Woodbrook. An article written by Walter Strickland and published in the Journal of the Archaeological Society of the County of Kildare in 1918 provides a detailed account of the origins of the Chetwood family and their arrival in Ireland following the restoration of Charles II in 1660. There is some uncertainty as to how Knightly Chetwood, whose family had been impoverished English gentry, managed to acquire the lands in County Laois on which Woodbrook now stands: Strickland proposes that it may have come to him via his spouse, but without being able to say precisely how this should have been the case. In any case, some years after the couple’s marriage in August 1700, despite living contentedly in County Meath, he embarked on a project to build a residence on his midland’s property, albeit with some reluctance: at one stage he implored a friend to find him another house in Meath, since otherwise he would be condemned to ‘go and live in a bog in a far off country.’ Indeed, being as Strickland says ‘an uncompromising Tory,’ following the accession of George I in 1714, Chetwood found it best to live, if not in a bog then certainly in a far-off country, spending a number of years in mainland Europe before returning to Ireland around 1721 when he took an oath of allegiance to the Hanoverian monarch and abjured the Stuart pretender. It may have only been after this time that serious work commenced on the house at Woodbrook.





We know more about the early development of the Woodbrook estate than would usually be the case thanks to surviving correspondence between Knightley Chetwood and Dean Swift, who not only provided its proprietor with advice but visited the place on a number of occasions. There was likely some kind of residence already on the site, not least because Chetwood was able to write letters from there even before his new house had been built. Strickland cites a note from Swift to his host dated 6th November 1714 and composed when he had arrived at Woodbrook to find the Chetwoods away from home. The following month, after the dean’s departure, Chetwood informed him, ‘This place I hate since you left it.’ Swift is believed to have been responsible for planting a grove of beech trees close to the house, although these were cut down in 1917 for sale to the then-Government. The two men also make regular reference to an area of the estate called the ‘Dean’s field.’ Once Chetwood returned from his self-imposed exile and turned his attention to erecting a new house, Swift’s opinion was again sought, the dean recommending in June 1731, ‘I can only advise you to ask advice, to go on slowly and to have your house on paper before you put it into lime and stone.’ Unfortunately, it was around this time that the friendship of almost twenty years came to an end. Chetwood seems to have had a tricky, volatile character. He had already become estranged from his wife, husband and wife formally separating in 1725, and he was inclined to find himself embroiled in rows on a regular basis: that he and Swift should fall out accordingly seems to have been inevitable. Chetwood died in London in 1752 and Woodbrook then passed to his elder surviving son, Valentine but since he spent most of his life out of Ireland, it was the younger son Crewe Chetwood who stayed in Laois. The next generation, Jonathan Cope Chetwood, did live at Woodbrook from the time he inherited the property in 1771 until his own death in 1839. As he had no immediate heir, the estate went sideways passing to Edward Wilmost, a great-grandson of Crewe Chetwood, who duly took the additional surname of Chetwood. However, following the death during the Boer War of Edward Wilmot-Chetwood, Woodbrook passed to another branch of the family, being inherited by Major Harold Chetwood-Aiken; his widow lived there until 1965 when what remained of the estate was taken over by the Land Commission. 





The evolution of the house now standing at Woodbrook is complex, even by Irish standards. The original building commissioned by Knightley Chetwood can be seen in a pencil drawing reproduced in Strickland’s 1918 article and shows the long east-facing entrance front, seemingly single-storey but with two-storeys visible to one side and dominated by a great doorcase beneath a steeply-pitched roof. A 1770 ground floor survey is described by Colum O’Riordan in House and Home as depicting ‘a vaguely L shaped building with an indeterminate number of accretions around an older core.’ Much of this structure appears to have been damaged or destroyed in a fire in the early 19th century, after which Jonathan Cope Chetwood undertook extensive alterations to the house, not least the addition of a new neo-classical entrance front facing south. Designed c.1815 by James Shiel, it included a spacious hall off which opened drawing and dining rooms. The older part of the building contained the library and staircase, and, beyond these, service quarters including a double-height kitchen one wall of which was filled with a great dresser and above which, according to Strickland, were painted the words ‘BE CLEANLY. HAVE TASTE. HAVE PLENTY. NO WASTE.’ Later in the 19th century, further changes took place, not least in the drawing room where the walls were covered with 15 murals representing scenes of the Scottish Highlands: still extant (although some are currently undergoing restoration), they were painted in 1840 by artist David Ramsay Hay, commissioned by Lady Jane Erskine, daughter of the 25th/8th Earl of Mar and wife of  Edward Wilmot-Chetwood, as reminders of her native country. At some unknown date, a five-storey polygonal tower was added towards the rear of the house on the east side.
Alas, the later decades of the last century were not kind to Woodbrook. All the ancient trees, not least those lining the avenue to the house, were all cut down in 1969. The lake to the immediate east, created by Jonathan Cole Chetwood, also suffered devastation causing the loss of what was said to have been the largest heronry in the country. Then, in the 1970s, the owners of the house demolished almost all of what had stood behind Shiel’s early 19th century extension, everything that had remained from the original building constructed by Knightley Chetwood, along with the great kitchen and the polygonal tower. This strangely truncated property somehow survived until the present century when another owner ambitiously reconstructed the sections that had been reduced to rubble just a few decades earlier. In consequence, at least on the exterior, Woodbrook looks much as it did when still occupied by the last members of the Chetwood family. Just under two years ago, the house and surrounding lands changed hands once more, and the current owners have embarked on an ambitious and admirable programme of restoration and restitution, with thousands of trees being planted, the lake being brought back to life and the surrounding lands improved. Similar considerate work is taking place inside the building so that in due course Woodbrook will once again take its place among County Laois’s finest country houses. It’s always thrilling to visit a property which is undergoing renewal, and the owners of Woodbrook deserve all the applause and support they can get. 


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Salvaged



Dating from c.1796-1801, St Mary’s Church in Johnstown, County Kilkenny is typical of the form such buildings took at the period, aided by support from the Board of First Fruits. Of three bays with windows on the south side but none on the north and the entrance through a tower at the west end, it conforms to type except for two features, one being the aforementioned door and the other being the window at the east end. Both of these are late-medieval and believed to have come from another church a few miles away at Fertagh. This had been the site of an Augustinian priory and, after the Reformation, served as a parish church for the Church of Ireland. When that building’s roof collapsed in 1780, it was abandoned and then the present church built in Johnstown. Below are a couple of early memorials found on the east wall, one of them to John Hely of nearby Foulkscourt, who had been responsible for developing the village in the 1770s.



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A Convenient House of Lime and Stone



Originally from Ayrshire, the first Conynghams arrived in Ireland at some date in the early 17th century and by the time of the outbreak of the Confederate Wars in 1641, the family owned property in the cities of Armagh and Derry, along with lands in both their counties and Tyrone. In 1653, Colonel William Conyngham, one of the Commonwealth commissioners in County Armagh during and after this tumultuous period, bought for £200 ‘the town, village, hamlet, place, baliboe or parcel of land called Ballydrum in the parish of Ardtra’ in County Derry, running to 350 acres. There may have been a pre-existing house of some kind already on this property, but if so it was replaced by another constructed by the colonel’s son, likewise called William and remembered as ‘Good Will’. In 1680 he had married 16 year old Anne Upton of Castle Upton, County Antrim and under the terms of the couple’s wedding settlement had agreed to provide his wife with ‘a convenient house of lime and stone, two stories high with necessary office houses.’ This became known as Springhill, its name derived from a nearby spring.






Springhill is a rare example of a 17th century Ulster Planter’s house which has survived to the present. When first constructed, presumably not long after the marriage of William and Anne Conyngham, the building was, as agreed by the terms of the settlement, of two storeys with rough-cast walls and slate roof, although the door was then off-centre and the canted bay wings did not exist. However, the two freestanding outbuildings placed at 90 degrees on either side of the main house do date from this first period. Thereby creating a forecourt, that to the left was occupied by senior staff and behind it was a yard holding turf shed, brew house, laundry and slaughter house, with enclosed gardens beyond. That to the right provided accommodation for other workers on the estate, the ground behind it sloping down to another pair of yards containing stables and, at furthest remove, a dovecote. William and Anne Conyngham had no direct heir, so when he died in 1721, the property here passed to a nephew, George Butle who duly assumed his uncle’s surname. The son of a Belfast merchant, he appears to have made no changes to the house, unlike his son William who around 1770 added wings to the house, that to the left being used as a nursery, that to the right a drawing/ballroom. As had been the case earlier in the century, he died in 1784 without a son to inherit, so Springhill passed to his younger brother David but, following his own death four years later, the estate was inherited once more by a nephew, George Lenox who chose to hyphenate his name, becoming Lenox-Conyngham. His son, William Lenox-Conynham, made further alterations to the house, adding a dining room in 1820, the year after his marriage to Charlotte Staples of Lissan, County Tyrone (see Barefoot but Battling « The Irish Aesthete). Three more generations of the family owned Springhill until, shortly before his death in 1957, Captain William Lowry Lenox-Conyngham passed responsibility for the property to the National Trust, although his mother Mina Lenox-Conyngham continued to live there until her own death four years later: she is remembered for writing An Old Ulster House, a detailed history of Springhill and its owners. 






As mentioned, Springhill is notable for being the best preserved example of a 17th century Planter house in Ulster, despite the later additions. Fortunately the Conynghams and then Lenox-Conynghams seem to have thrown nothing away, and therefore the interiors retain almost all their original appearance and contents, another rarity. It is not difficult to distinguish the period in which each room was constructed, since they then underwent little alteration. To the front, there are three main rooms, centred on the entrance hall, behind which rises a staircase with yew banisters and oak treads. To the left of the hall is a study, originally the parlour. In the 19th century, when alterations were being made to the house, this room was given oak panelling but after the National Trust assumed responsibility for the building and undertook restoration work, English hand-blocked paper was discovered still intact on the walls. Also here are a number of antique firearms, including a long gun presented to Alderman James Lenox after the Siege of Derry. To the right of the hall was the former dining room, turned into a library in the 19th century when the bookcases were installed here; as elsewhere, the contents – some 3,000 volumes collected over two and a half centuries – remained when Springhill became a National Trust property. Beyond lies the high-ceilinged drawing room of the 1770s and behind that the dining room added half a century later. Although some alterations to the property have been made (a 19th century smoking room, for example, was demolished by the NT in the aftermath of it assuming responsibility) Springhill better conveys the evolution of an historic house and its various residents than many others open to the public. As Mina Lenox-Conyngham wrote in An Old Ulster House, even the trees in the surrounding demesne ‘could tell many a tale of the nine generations of the family who have walked beneath their shade and have talked together of interests and projects, fears and misgivings for the dear old home whose spell must have twined itself around their hearts.’ 



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In 1779 Charles Agar, hitherto Bishop of Cloyne, was appointed Archbishop of Cashel, following the death of the previous incumbent, Dr Michael Cox. The latter, although he had occupied the archiepiscopal seat for the previous quarter-century, had spent little time in Cashel, preferring to live in the splendid residence he commissioned in County Kilkenny, Castletown Cox. As a result, when Agar arrived in Cashel, he discovered that the palace there ‘certainly had undergone no alterations, and probably received but few repairs from the time it was built…and as the house is wainscotted throughout the parlour and bedchamber stories, and much of the former had originally been painted of a dark brown colour, it made at this time but a dismal appearance.’ Today an hotel, Cashel Palace was designed by Sir Edward Lovett Pearce around 1727 for the then-archbishop Timothy Godwin but he died two years later and the building was completed by his successor Theophilus Bolton who, as is well-known, constructed a library beside his residence, bequeathing a collection of  more than 8,000 volumes to the archdiocese. The Rev Henry Cotton in his Fasti ecclesiae Hibernicae (1847) estimated that the construction cost £3,730, while more recently Anthony Malcomson, in his magisterial Archbishop Charles Agar: Churchmanship and Politics in Ireland, 1760-1810 (2002) has proposed a figure of £3,611. This was an expensive project but by the time Agar arrived, further expenditure was required to bring the palace up to date. The building seems to have been in such poor condition that Sir Cornwallis Maude, who lived not far away at Dundrum, offered the archbishop his own house while he ordered the repairs ‘which I believe necessary before it can be fit for your accommodation.’ Working with the architect Oliver Grace, Agar embarked on a programme of improvements to the palace, which in total would cost him £1,123. 





Recording his time in Cashel, Archbishop Agar noted that when he arrived ‘The door from the hall into the salon was exactly opposite the hall door, and there was in the salon a door into the garden exactly opposite to the door of the room; which not only cut the room, as it were, in two, but rendered it so cold that, as often as any one of the three doors was opened, the room was not habitable with comfort, for no company could be so situated as not to feel the wind. The Archbishop therefore stopped up the door in the centre of the room, and took away entirely that which opened into the garden. He placed the door in the hall at the end of the south side, let all of the windows of the salon down to the ground, and put double doors to this and every room on the parlour storey, and new-sashed the parlour and bed-chamber stories in front and rear. He…put the best species of register grates in the hall, salon and eating parlour, and in all the other rooms of the house. He also painted the whole house once and in some parts twice since he has inhabited it.’ Today, the salon (ie. the drawing room) retains the alterations made to it by Agar, although French windows once again allow access to the gardens. Of the interiors from the time of the palace’s original construction, the staircase hall still has its splendid staircase and the entrance hall retains its panelling. A room to the immediate right of the latter, now used as an office, is also panelled but this decoration may have been recycled when the house underwent reordering by Agar (or even more recently) because until his arrival it served as the main dining room…





‘Though the house was substantially built,’ Archbishop Agar later wrote, ‘and the plan originally a good one in most respects, in some it stood in great need of amendment. The eating parlour was only 19 feet 6 inches by 17 feet, a room certainly altogether too small for such a purpose in such a house. This room was on the east side of the great hall of entrance and could not be enlarged. On the west side of the hall was a room of the same dimensions, at the north end of which, and between it and the breakfast parlour, was a dark passage from the hall to the gallery, leading to the library, in which there was a staircase which communicated by a trap door with the north end of the corridor in the bedroom story. Dr Agar removed this staircase entirely, took down the wall of partition and threw the passage into the eating room, which made it 30 feet long by 19 feet 6 inches broad, and placed a window over the door leading to the library, in order to render that part of the eating room more light.’ After it became an hotel in the 1960s, Agar’s eating room was further opened into the adjacent breakfast parlour to the south to create one large dining room; a divider marks the former division between the two spaces. While many of his alterations were felicitous and have survived, one addition to the building – the construction of a study perched to the rear – proved unsuccessful, not least due to damp, and was taken down by his successor, Charles Brodrick. He is believed to have carried out further alterations to the palace, not least the insertion of dormer windows on the top floor but consideration of Brodrick’s interventions here must wait for another time. 


On May 19th next, I shall be giving a paper on ‘Diocesan domesticity: daily life in Cashel Palace during the episcopacy of Charles Agar, 1779-1801’ at the 23rd Historic Houses Conference held in Maynooth University. For more information, please see: CSHIHE 2025 conference programme Final.pdf

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