Tag Archives: Georgian Architecture

Brought to Book

Back in 1980 photographer Simon Marsden published a book on Irish country houses with the self-explanatory title In Ruins. It quickly sold out and has since become a bibliophiles’ favourite. Many more such works by other photographers subsequently followed, so many that one began to gain the impression of vultures gathering to feast on a corpse even before the death certificate had been issued. Sometimes it seems as though the fewer historic properties of worth that Ireland possesses, the more they will be appreciated: like the Dodo, their value will only be fully understood when the last one has fallen into irreversible ruin.
The crumbling Irish house is a staple of our national literature (think the wondrous Molly Keane, together with many others before and since) and so too are books which apparently thrive on depicting yet another building in terminal decay. It is easy to understand the appeal of these publications, essentially romantic and inspired by a concept of the past that helps to make illusory television series like Downton Abbey so popular. It is a vision of history that regards old buildings, and in particular Ireland’s great houses, as having the same kind of use-by date as found on supermarket food, after which they can serve no further purpose. According to this erroneous attitude they should be allowed, if not actively encouraged, to fall down, thereby permitting a myth to be constructed in their absence.

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These somewhat melancholic thoughts were inadvertently inspired by an admirable new publication, Irish Country Houses: A Chronicle of Change. Author David Hicks discusses 24 properties spread across the four provinces and has had the original idea of featuring old photographs of the houses in their heyday alongside images of how they look now. The comparisons are rarely kind, although not always as Hicks intended. He is, for example, more generous than really ought to be the case about Adare Manor, County Limerick and Farnham in County Cavan, both converted into hotels with a singular want of sympathetic taste. And he includes Powerscourt, County Wicklow which is a travesty of restoration and deserves nothing other than condemnation. This really is an instance where the ruin was preferable to what has since been done.
That is the criticism out of the way, because otherwise Hicks’ book merits congratulation, not least thanks to texts which are both well-informed and well-written, a rare phenomenon in this genre where writers can display scant interest in researching the history of buildings they present. As a rule he is sympathetic but not sentimental, clearly passionate about his subject but not (perhaps with the exception of Powerscourt) to the exclusion of objectivity.

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And the photographs are just fascinating, albeit occasionally in a ghoulish way. The first picture at the top of this piece, and the two that follow, are of Downhill, County Londonderry, the immense palace built on a cliff top overlooking the Atlantic by that notable eccentric Frederick Hervey, Earl-Bishop of Derry (1730-1803). Admirers of Amanda Foreman’s biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire may be interested to know that the Duke’s long-time mistress (and eventual second wife) was the Earl-Bishop’s daughter, Lady Elizabeth Foster. Downhill was aptly named: within fifty years of Hervey’s death it started to go irreversibly down hill, not least thanks to a disastrous fire in 1851 which gutted much of the interior and destroyed some of the finest contents. Although rebuilt twenty years later, by the early 1950s the building had been dismantled; it is now in the care of the National Trust, as is the ravishing Mussenden Temple, the adjacent domed rotunda also built by the Earl-Bishop.
The next two photographs show a house at the other end of the country, Castle Bernard in County Cork. Originally called Castle Mahon and part of the territory controlled by the O’Mahonys, in the 17th century it was acquired by an English settler, Francis Bernard whose descendants became Earls of Bandon; they greatly extended the property, with major rebuilding taking place in the early 19th century. Despite a jumble of styles, the eventual result looks charming in old photographs. In June 1921 the fourth Earl and his wife were forced out of the castle by a branch of the IRA before the building was set on fire. Lord Bandon, a septuagenarian, was then kidnapped and held hostage for three weeks before being released. Seeing the gutted shell of Castle Bernard, his niece wrote ‘The ruin is absolute and all one can do is wander across the mass of debris in those precious rooms.’

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Finally, above is Clonbrock, County Galway, a house needlessly lost within living memory. The estate belonged to the long-established Dillon family who built Clonbrock in the 1780s to replace a previous residence which had been burnt, seemingly by a firework let off to celebrate the birth of the then-owner’s heir. Various additions, such as the Doric portico and the two low wings, were made during the first half of the 19th century but the central block remained unaltered, notable for the refined neo-classical plasterwork of its main rooms. The Dillons were ardent photographers and their archive today provides one of the best sources of information for life in the Irish country house.
Successive generations of the family lived at Clonbrock until 1976 when economic circumstances forced the sale of house and contents. The building was then placed on the market but despite various statements of interest it failed to find a buyer and in 1984 was destroyed by fire; I remember at the time meeting a German family who had hoped to take over Clonbrock and were dismayed by what occurred. Now it stands as yet another testament to our want of aesthetic appreciation – or maybe to our perverse preference for romantic ruins…

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Irish Country Houses: A Chronicle of Change is published by Collins Press

In Circe’s Circle

Mount Stewart, County Down formerly belonged to the Vane-Tempest-Stewarts, Marquesses of Londonderry but was given to the National Trust in 1977. However the family retain private quarters in the house including this drawing room which opens onto the gardens created by Edith, 7th Marchioness between the two World Wars. Known as Circe, she can be seen over the chimney piece in a 1913 portrait by Philip de László.

Perfection is the Child of Time

Russborough, County Wicklow on a fresh morning earlier this week. Built in the 1740s to the design of Richard Castle, at almost 700 feet it has the longest facade of any house in Ireland, the entirety fronted in granite from a local quarry. Even after some 270 years the stone has kept its crispness, as can be seen in the march of parapet urns, but mellowed through exposure to the elements, bringing Russborough to a perfection only achieved by the passage of sufficient time.

Felix Phoenix

Claimed as the largest such enclosed city space in Europe, Dublin’s Phoenix Park this year celebrates the 350th anniversary of its creation. The park’s name derives from an anglicisation of ‘fionn uisce’ meaning clear water, referring to a spa once located in the vicinity. In the Middle Ages, the 1,750 acres now surrounded by eleven miles of wall were owned by the Knights Hospitaller and following the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII the lands eventually reverted to the British Crown.
In 1662 Charles II’s representative in Ireland, James Butler, first Duke of Ormonde established a royal hunting ground on the site: descendants of the herd of fallow deer he introduced still roam the park today. One of its most attractive, if unsung, features is the location of the park. On raised ground to the north-west of the city centre, views to the south soar over urban sprawl and offer an unimpeded spectacle of the Dublin Mountains.
Just over a decade after being created by Ormonde the park was almost lost when the Charles II proposed to grant the land to his venal former mistress Barbara Villiers whose compliant husband had been given an Irish peerage; fortunately the country’s then-Viceroy Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex resisted this scheme’s implementation and ensured the Phoenix Park was not lost.

An equal debt is owed to a later Lord Lieutenant, Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, for allowing public access to the park for the first time; the principal east-west route continues to bear the name Chesterfield Avenue. The worldly Lord Chesterfield is probably best known today for the posthumously published volume of letters to his son which I remember reading with much pleasure over thirty years ago, despite (or perhaps because of) James Boswell’s stricture that they taught ‘the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing-master.’ But in Ireland, Lord Chesterfield’s memory should be cherished since during his brief viceregal tenure (from January 1745 to November 1746) he encouraged indigenous industry and ensured peace while Charles Stuart, the Young Pretender, was trying to inspire rebellion in neighbouring Scotland. It is said that on one occasion, an anxious supporter of the regime burst into his bedroom to report ‘the papists in Ireland are all up,’ to which Lord Chesterfield, with characteristic insouciance, responded, ‘I am not surprised at it’ before looking at his watch and adding, ‘why, it is ten o’clock, I should have been up too, had I not overslept myself.’
This was the man who decided the pleasures of the Phoenix Park should not be enjoyed only by the crown’s representative but by all citizens and accordingly opened its gates to the public. He also initiated a policy of tree planting and other landscape works, as well as erecting the fluted corinthinan Phoenix Column at the centre of the park. Its base features a carved inscription recording Chesterfield’s beneficence while the top is crowned with a fancifully rococo interpretation of the mythical phoenix.

Three of the park’s most significant structures are within a short distance of the Phoenix Column: Ashtown Castle, an early 17th century towerhouse, once part of a larger building that served as the Under-Secretary’s Lodge under the British regime and then Papal Nunciature post-Independence and is now a somewhat uninspiring visitors’ centre; Deerfield, the American Ambassador’s residence, originally the Chief Secretary’s Lodge, the core of which dates from the mid-1770s; and Áras an Uachtaráin, now the residence of the President of Ireland. Prior to this, it was the Vice-Regal Lodge, although originally built for himself c.1752-57 by the politician and amateur architect Nathaniel Clements after he had obtained the sinecure of Park Ranger. Five years after Clements’ death in 1777 his son sold the building to the government for use as residence for the Lord Lieutenant. It has been subject to periodic enlargements and improvements ever since, but overall remains an incoherent, unsatisfactory building.
Indeed, aside from the Phoenix Column, the only really sound piece of design in the park is the Wellington Testimonial (pace architectural historian Christine Casey who calls it ‘formidable and rather dreary’). Designed by Sir Robert Smirke and completed in 1820, this monument to the Irish-born Duke of Wellington’s victory over Napoleon is 220 feet high and 120 feet square at the base. The pedestal bas-reliefs were added in the 1860s; one feels the obelisk would be purer – if perhaps even more formidable – without them. There was an attempt made by dissident republicans to blow up the obelisk, in the same way Nelson’s Pillar on O’Connell Street was destroyed by a bomb in 1966, but the structure’s sheer mass defeated their efforts. Ideologues rarely display good aesthetic judgement.
The Phoenix Park is today under the care of the Office of Public Works which does a competent job, with occasional slips: shame on whoever permitted uPVC window frames to be used in the 1830s Castleknock Gate lodge. And credit to Lords Ormonde and Chesterfield for their foresight.

The Old Town looks the Same

Ramelton, County Donegal is marketed as a ‘heritage town’ and with the place’s history and excellent stock of old buildings there is every reason to consider the moniker well deserved. However, as so often proves the case in Ireland a sizeable gap opens between aspiration and actuality. Ramelton has potential, but the greater part of it remains unrealised. And given both the country’s economy and an habitual Irish inability to recognise obvious opportunity, that scenario is unlikely to change any time soon.
The town’s situation is particularly lovely. The main approach is from Letterkenny further south, the road suddenly descending until it comes to a halt on Ramelton’s quayside, grandiloquently named the Mall. Across the river Lennon the land is densely wooded, a perfect counterpoise to the urban development it faces and a reminder of how the entire area once looked.
While people have been living in this part of the world for thousands of years Ramelton is essentially a planters’ town, settled by English and Scottish immigrants in the 17th century; tellingly, a meeting house dating from around 1680 (and today the local library) is believed to be the oldest centre for Presbyterian worship in Ireland. The reason for the site’s appeal to settlers is that it lies at a point where the Lennon widens to join Lough Swilly and thence flows into the Atlantic Ocean.

So Ramelton developed as a port with ships regularly travelling between this part of the country and British, French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, their holds filled with produce like corn and bacon and dairy products. A series of stone warehouses along the quays bears witness to the town’s former prosperity, aided by the regional success of the linen industry: by the early 1840s Ramelton had Donegal’s largest linen bleaching works, evident in a still-extent complex of buildings called the Tanyard at the west end of the Mall.
Decline set in soon after, with Belfast’s emergence as Ireland’s pre-eminent centre for linen, along with the silting of the Lennon and the arrival of the railway to Letterkenny. Like so many other Irish towns, from the second half of the 19th century onwards Ramelton suffered from that peculiarly indigenous combination of neglect and apathy.
The trouble is that in large measure it still does. As elsewhere, the boom years saw plenty of building work but on the periphery of the town. Here you’ll find the customary unimaginative new housing estates with names like The Elms (and, naturally enough, not a single example of the species to be seen).

Meanwhile the historic centre was allowed to slide into dereliction. On almost every street there are gaps where houses have been demolished and sites left vacant; Ramelton is a beauty whose smile reveals advanced dental decay. Typically, on Back Lane a row of old houses which could be utterly winning have fallen into such decrepitude that ‘windows’ are now painted onto boarded-up fronts.
Many of the handsome quay warehouses have fared no better; their sturdiness is being severely tested by wilful neglect. Next to one of them on Shore Road, a typically pointless public amenity has been created on a vacant site: a so-called park featuring quantities of unalluring hard grey surfaces and only a margin of grass. Except as a short-cut for pedestrians, it looks little used – as evidenced by a local farmer parking his tractor and trailer so close to the entrance gate that access was well-nigh impossible.

There is apparently a local Tidy Towns committee and no doubt the members work hard to keep Ramelton as litter-free as possible. But their efforts can only go so far. What’s needed here – and elsewhere – is an understanding of how to capitalise on Ramelton’s currently dormant charm. A similar town in France or Italy would not be filled with vacant sites but instead with visitors enchanted by the distinctive character of the place. Ramelton could be a tourist hub – and recover some of its economic viability – if only serious restoration work were undertaken. There’s no point calling it a heritage town if the heritage is then disregarded.

Heaven’s Gate

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Garden Gates at Leixlip Castle, County Kildare. Desmond Guinness says these were originally part of the Dublin city reservoir or basin developed in 1721-22 adjacent to where his family later developed the well-known brewery. When the basin was filled in during the 1970s, Desmond acquired the gates.

Nature Full of Poetry

‘In this sequester’d, wild, romantic dell
Where nature loves in solitude to dwell,
Who would expect ‘midst such a lonely park
The charms of fancy and the plans of art,
Whilst the neat mansion, formed with simple taste,
Amidst a wilderness for comfort plac’d,|
Adorns the scene and hospitably shews
The seat of pleasure and serene repose.’
So in 1807 wrote, Joseph Atkinson, an army officer-turned-playwright, of Luggala, County Wicklow. For more than 200 years, this secluded valley tucked deeo into the Wicklow Mountains has been the subject of many such encomia, generations of visitors captivated by what they have found there.
Yet until the onset of the Romantic era at the end of the 18th century Luggala, along with much of the surrounding region, lay unoccupied, untended and largely unknown. Only following its discovery around 1787 by Peter La Touche, a rich banker in search of seclusion, did Luggala come to public notice. Having remained free from the intervention of man for millennia the site, La Touche wisely realised, demanded nothing other than a dwelling with a character to match the setting. Designed by a now-unknown architect, this is Luggala Lodge, facing Lough Tay at the other end of the valley and terminating a vista that stretches from lake shore to steep ground immediately behind. As James Brewer remarked in 1825 the building ‘is well adapted to the recluse parts of Ireland, where nature reigns in wild and mysterious majesty.’

Three years before Brewer the Rev. George Newenham Wright, a cleric with literary aspirations, published A Guide to the County of Wicklow. Several pages of the book are devoted to Luggala, the author awe-struck that the first view of the site ‘is of a bold, awful and sublime character’ and the sheer mass of mountainside closing the prospect ‘exhibiting a continued mass of naked granite to the very summit, forming the most complete representation of all that is wild, dreary and desolate in nature, and defying all attempts at innovation that the aspiring genius of man has ever dared to undertake.’ Not long afterwards, Prince Herman von Pückler-Muskau, an impoverished German aristocrat travelling through Britain and Ireland in search of a wife wealthy enough to fund his inclination towards extravagance, visited County Wicklow and afterwards reported:, ‘I reached the summit of the mountain above the magnificent valley and lake of Luggelaw, the sun gilded all the country beneath me, though the tops of the hills were yet shrouded in mist. This valley belongs to a wealthy proprietor, who has converted it into a delightful park…It is indeed a lovely spot of earth, lonely and secluded; the wood full of game, the lake full of fish and nature full of poetry.’ When American film director John Huston wrote his memoir An Open Book in 1980 he recalled the first time he had visited Luggala twenty-nine years earlier. Arriving late at night and in the dark, he had seen little. ‘The next morning at dawn I went to the window and looked out upon a scene I have never forgotten. Through pines and yews in the garden I saw, across a running stream, a field of marigolds and beyond the field – surprisingly – a white sandy beach bordering a black lake…Above the lake was a mountain of black rock rising precipitously, and on its crest – like a shawl over a piano – a profusion of purple heather. I was to go back to Luggala many times, but I’ll never forget that first impression. I was Ireland’s own from that moment.’

Luggala Lodge, wrote the Knight of Glin in 1965, is an example of ‘that special brand of eighteenth-century gothick that rejoices in little battlements, crochets, trefoil and quatrefoil windows and ogee mantelpieces: in fact, the gothick of pastrycooks and Rockingham china.’ The building observed Michael Luke some twenty years ago, shines ‘like the discarded crown of a prima ballerina.’ Bulgarian-born author Stephane Groueff who stayed in the house during the 1950s remembered it ‘looking like an illustration from a nursery book of “The Queen of Hearts”.’ And actress Anjelica Huston recalls Luggala from her childhood: ‘It was like going into a fairy tale. Descending into the dell with the ferns and the overhanging trees, the flocks of deer and the pheasants, and then coming on the magical lake with its sand made up of chips of mica.’
Diarist Frances Partridge came to stay in the early 1950s and afterwards recorded, ‘What a magical atmosphere that house had, charmingly furnished and decorated to match its style, dim lights, soft music playing and Irish voices ministering seductively to our needs.’ Sixty years later, author and critic Francis Wyndham remembers Luggala as being ‘the most romantic place I’ve ever known,’ and recalls ‘that sparkling little jewel of a house with the black lake before it.’
And here is the present custodian of Luggala, the Hon. Garech Browne, wonderfully photographed by Neil Gavin in the house’s drawing room. Like each of his predecessors, Garech has ensured the special character of this spot be preserved. Luggala today remains as it was in the time of Joseph Atkinson, ‘the seat of pleasure and serene repose.’

My new book, Luggala Days: The Story of a Guinness House, has now been published.

When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound*

This 18th century mahogany hunt table is due to be auctioned on Sunday by de Vere’s of Dublin. The last time it came on the market was in 1932 when offered in the house contents sale of Coole Park, County Galway, residence of Lady Gregory who had died earlier that year. Some time later, the chairman of Ireland’s Board of Works declared that while Lady Gregory’s place in the pantheon of Anglo-Irish literature was assured, ‘it is straining it somewhat to suggest that her home should be preserved as a National Monument on that account.’ Coole Park, which today would be a place of pilgrimage, was accordingly demolished in 1941.
*from ‘Coole Park’ by W.B. Yeats
Addendum: The table sold for €4,000.

Moonlight Becomes You

An early 19th century watercolour depicting Luggala, County Wicklow. The artist responsible was Cecilia Margaret Nairn, née Campbell (1791-1857), the daughter and wife of painters; exhibiting from the age of eighteen, she specialised in picturesque landscapes such as this nocturnal scene.
For further information on Luggala, see my article in this coming Saturday’s Irish Times magazine.