Here is a scenario familiar to anyone engaged with or concerned for the welfare of our architectural heritage. At some date in the 18th/19th centuries a house is built on the outskirts of a town, often by a prosperous burgher keen to demonstrate his affluence. Over the intervening decades, the adjacent urban centre gradually expands so that a building once surrounded by open fields is increasingly encircled by housing estates. Eventually these press up against what remains of the former estate, which comes to acquire a besieged appearance. As a result, the owners – perhaps no longer so prosperous or perhaps knowing it is time to realise an asset – sell up. The place is then bought by someone more interested in the commercial value of the land on which the house sits than in the historic property. Accordingly, despite being listed for preservation the building is not maintained, begins to decay, is subject to vandalism, possibly even an arson attack, and falls into total dereliction. At which point the relevant authorities will relist the property as dangerous and require its demolition. The land will be cleared, a new housing estate built and the original property perhaps only recalled in the name this development is given: a fait accompli.

Brandondale, County Kilkenny lies on a site above the river Barrow on the outskirts of Graiguenamanagh. The house dates from c.1800 when it was built by Peter Burtchaell whose family had come to Ireland in the middle of the 17th century. The Burchaells were involved in the linen industry which then thrived in this part of Ireland, and also seem to have acted as agents for the Agars, Lords Clifden, large landowners whose seat was Gowran Castle in the same county. Peter Burchaell married the heiress Catherine Rothe and her fortune duly passed into the family which would have provided the necessary money for building a house like Brandondale. In his Handbook for Ireland (1844) James Fraser wrote that the property, ‘occupying a fine site on the northern acclivities of Brandon hill, commands the town, the prolonged and lovely windings of the Barrow, the picturesque country on either side of its banks, and the whole of the Mount Leinster and Black Stairs range of mountains.’ The architecture of the house was that of a two-storey Regency villa, old photographs showing it distinguished by a covered veranda wrapping around the canted bow at the south-eastern end of the building which had views down to the river. Within this sightline must have been a little gothic tea house now roofless and submerged in woodland; built of limestone rubble, this square structure incorporates granite window and door openings that may be of mediaeval origin (perhaps recycled from the Duiske Abbey in the centre of Graiguenamanagh).

The last of the Burtchaell line to live at Brandondale was Richard, who livd there until his death in 1903. He and his wife Sarah had no children and she remained on the property for the next twenty-nine years, struggling to make ends meet by taking in paying guests. After her death the house and remaining fifty acres were sold to the Belgian Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove who first lived there and then rented the place before he in turn sold it. In the 1980s Brandondale was bought by an Englishman Walter Dominy who moved in with his family and established a printing business. After this failed, in 1993 Mr Dominy left a suicide note in his car while travelling on the Rosslare to Fishguard ferry: fifteen years later an English tabloid newspaper found him living in France. But meanwhile Brandondale changed hands yet again and at some point was subject to a spectacularly poor refurbishment which saw the Regency veranda removed and all the old fenestration replaced with uPVC. In recent years it was taken into receivership and offered for sale on 25 acres for just €150,000, an indication of the building’s atrocious condition (and also of a Compulsory Purchase Order from the local council on part of the land). The place has apparently been sold once more but still sits empty and deteriorating: it can only be a matter of time before Brandondale’s condition is judged so bad that, despite being listed for preservation, demolition is ordered. After which, no doubt, an application will be lodged for houses to be built on the land. A fait accompli.
Below is a Burtchaell tomb in the graveyard surrounding an already-demolished Church of Ireland church in Graiguenamanagh: very likely soon to be the only recollection of Brandondale.