Tag Archives: Georgian Architecture

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 Need of Amendment


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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Early Georgian at its Finest



Justly described by Alistair Rowan as the ‘finest early Georgian church in north west Ulster’, this is St John’s, Clondehorky, County Donegal. Dating from 1752, its design has been attributed to Michael Priestley, an architect who worked in the area during this period: it may have been commissioned by the Wrays who then owned the nearby Ards estate (their successors there, the Stewart family, had a vault by the church). Unlike many other Church of Ireland places of worship, this one underwent little alteration in the 19th century, aside from the addition of a small vestry on the north side in 1853. Otherwise, it looks much as it did when first erected, with four Gibbsian segment-headed windows on the south side and Venetian windows at the west and east end, the latter being particularly substantial and having rusticated blocks take the place of pilasters.



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Behind a Modest Facade


Like many 18th century residential buildings in central Dublin, the facade of Ely House is extremely plain, of red brick with only the pedimented stone fan- and side-lit doorcase offering some interest. Of four storeys-over-basement, the building had been bought in 1770 by Henry Loftus from Dublin physician and property developer Gustavus Hume. The previous year, following the death of his unmarried nephew, the hitherto somewhat impoverished Loftus had inherited a substantial estate and the title Viscount Loftus: the following year he would be created Earl of Ely. Known for his social pretensions, he would be mocked as ‘Count Loftonzo’ in the satirical History of Barataria published in the Freeman’s Journal in Spring 1771. The work he commissioned at Rathfarnham Castle, County Dublin has already been discussed here (see A Whiter Shade of Pale « The Irish Aesthete and Flying High « The Irish Aesthete). Although Loftus already owned a house in the capital on Cavendish Row, following his inheritance evidently he felt the need to cross the river Liffey and occupy a new property, hence the purchase of Ely House. Unusual because of its size, the building was originally of six bays, a seventh being acquired on the left-hand (north) side in the 19th century around the time the house was divided into two properties: today it is near-impossible to photograph the entire exterior of the house without being assaulted by traffic: hence the somewhat truncated image here. When first occupied, the attic floor seemingly contained a private, sixty-seat theatre with space for an orchestra. The Freeman’s Journal of 19th April 1785 reports on the performance of both a tragedy (‘The Distressed Mother’) and a comedy (‘All the World’s a Stage’), both acted by friends of the earl’s second and much-younger wife, Anne Bonfoy. Sadly, nothing of this theatre now survives. But other parts of the remarkable interior remain to be explored. 





The rear of Ely House’s groundfloor is given over to the double-height stair hall, the steps of which are of Portland Stone, while the panelled balustrade is made of wrought iron and carved gilt-wood. At the base can be seen a life-size figure of Hercules, resting from his Labours. The latter are then depicted as one ascends the staircase, although not in the correct narrative order: shown here is the eagle killed with an arrow by the mythical hero. The inspiration for this work is believed to have been a substantially larger staircase in the Palace of Charles of Lorraine in Brussels – now a museum – created by the Flemish sculptor Laurent Delvaux in 1769. The stuccodore Barthelemy Cremillion, who had been employed in Ireland in the second half of the 1750s, was responsible for the Brussels palace plasterwork and is therefore thought to have been behind the similar scheme in Ely House since by this date he had returned to Dublin. On the other hand, Professor Christine Casey has pointed out that the stoneyard of sculptor John van Nost adjoined Lord Ely’s property and that both he and Cremillion had worked at the same time on the decoration of the city’s Lying-in Hospital (otherwise known as the Rotunda Hospital), so he may also have been involved here. 




Many of the reception rooms in Ely House, Dublin, are rather plain, although it retains some splendid chimneypieces again thought to have been the work of John van Nost. One of the ground floor reception rooms features a series of figurative ovals and roundels depicting a variety of scenes and surrounded by pendants and swirls that look like strings of pearls. It used to be judged that this plasterwork was part of the house’s 18th century decoration but more recently the scheme is considered to date from the late 19th/early 20th century when the building was occupied by the wealthy surgeon and collector Sir Thornley Stoker (incidentally, the elder brother of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula): he lived here from 1890 to 1911 and filled the building with his valuable collection of art and furniture, alas all auctioned before his death in 1912. The room directly above certainly suggests a relatively recent vintage, the figures here looking as though they had stepped out of the work of an Edwardian illustrator like Kate Greenaway. Since 1923, Ely House has been owned by the Knights of St Columbanus, an Irish Roman Catholic society which uses the building as its national headquarters. 

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Flawless


Limerick’s former Custom House, today the Hunt Museum, dates from the second half of the 1760s when designed by architect Davis Ducart. His origins were uncertain: in 1768, William Brownlow wrote that he had ‘dropped into this Kingdom from the clouds, no one knows how, or what brought him to it’ although it has been proposed that Ducart – his original name Daviso de Arcort – may have been Sardinian or Piedmontese. Whatever his background, Ducart enjoyed a successful career in Ireland, including the commission to design this custom house. Here is a splendid Venetian window on the northern wall of what is now called the Captain’s Room, seemingly where ships’ captains were received while their vessels were moored on the quay outside. It rises high to a coved ceiling, at the centre of which is a plaster rose. Simple, dignified, flawless.

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Yes, Vicar



Located opposite St Patrick’s Cathedral, Vicars’ Hill in Armagh owes its origins to Primate Hugh Boulter who in 1724 commissioned the construction of four houses here (now Nos. 1-4) to provide accommodation for clergymen’s widows, endowing this with a fund worth £50 per annum. These buildings are easily identified by their  handsome Gibbsian limestone doorcases. The rest of the terrace dates from half a century later when Primate Richard Robinson, as one of his projects within the city, commissioned a further seven houses, one of which (No.5) initially served as the Diocesan Registry Office but is now a museum while another of the buildings was erected as a Music Hall where boys who sang in the cathedral choir would train and sleep in rooms above.


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Astonished at the Splendour


The former House of Lords in what is now the Bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin was discussed here some time ago (see Where Turkeys Voted for Christmas « The Irish Aesthete). As is well known, after the building ceased to be used as the Irish Houses of Parliament and had been purchased by the bank, Francis Johnston was invited to make alterations, including the creation of a central Cash Office behind Edward Lovett Pearce’s south front. This five bay, double-height space rises to a richly decorated coved ceiling, the centre of which supports a clerestory concluding in a coffered ceiling. When George IV visited the bank during his visit to Ireland, he was reportedly ‘astonished at the splendour’ of the hall.

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