Comfortable in its Own Skin

Sep22

During the immense upheavals that occurred here over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, much of the country’s land changed hands on several occasions. In some instances, this was because those who had come into possession of it, by whatever means, sought to make a quick return on the value of their property, and thus soon sold it on. Others, however, especially if they were English-born younger sons with few prospects of becoming a landowner back home, preferred to remain in Ireland and could enhance their own acreage by acquiring that being disposed of by departing soldiery.
Such seems to have been the case with Francis Jackson, described in the 1875 edition of Burke’s Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland as descended from a branch ‘of the ancient Devonshire family of JACKSON, of Combhay’ who being a younger son had come to this country ‘as captain of dragoons in Cromwell’s army, and purchasing extensive landed property in the Barony of Tyrrawley and county of Mayo, had it shortly after the Restoration, confirmed to him and his heirs by patent of Charles II. He built a large fortified house at Enniscoe, on the banks of Lough Conn.’ Having established himself here, Francis Jackson remained in County Mayo until his death in 1678 when he left a son, Oliver, to inherit the property.

Oliver Jackson died soon after the conclusion of the Williamite Wars in 1691, just as some peace descended on the country. However, one of his two sons John Jackson died as a result of engaging in a duel in 1704 and so the estate went to his brother Oliver Jackson who married a Catherine Owens of County Louth with whom he had three sons, the younger two conveniently dying bachelors and having no offspring. Born in 1717 the eldest child George Jackson married Jane Cuffe whose father James was an MP for Mayo and whose uncle was Arthur Gore, first Earl of Arran: in 1797 her brother James Cuffe would become first (and last) Baron Tyrawley.
It may be because of these connections or because George and Jane Jackson had seven children that they decided to build a new residence at Enniscoe. Hitherto the family had lived in the fortified house erected by Francis Jackson on the shores of Lough Conn, its precise whereabouts now unknown. At some date around 1740-50, this was replaced by another building further from the lake but with views down to the water. This was a tall, single-gabled house of five bays and three storeys over basement.

The eldest of George and Jane Jackson’s progeny, likewise christened George, in 1783 married Maria Rutledge, only child and heir of William Rutledge of nearby Foxford; the couple would have thirteen children. Most likely their large family explains why Enniscoe was enlarged soon after the death the older George Jackson in 1789; work was completed by 1798 when it suffered some damage during the rebellion and failed French invasion of that year (after which William Rutledge lodged a claim for compensation to the government for just over £780 owing to ‘loss of cattle, wine, furniture, provisions and fire arms’). Interestingly the house’s new section was placed directly in front of the old, which still remains intact as the back part of the building today. Changes in taste mean this part of the property has more generously proportioned rooms than those to the rear. It has no basement and is of only two storeys rather than three. The main features are two large reception rooms on either side of the entrance hall with Adam-esque cornice friezes, white marble chimney pieces and an elegantly sinuous top-lit staircase undulating up to the first floor bedrooms.

George and Maria Jackson’s eldest son William, a colonel in the North Mayo Militia, did not match his parents’ fecundity, having only one child with his wife Jane Louise Blair, a daughter named Madeline Eglantine Jackson. On her father’s death she thus became an heiress and in 1834 married another large landowner, from the other side of the country, Mervyn Pratt of Cabra Castle, County Cavan. The Pratts, like the Jacksons, established themselves in Ireland in the first half of the 17th century, Joseph Pratt of Leicestershire having settled here in 1641. The marriage of these two families meant that in 1876 Mervyn Pratt was listed as owning 17,955 acres in County Mayo, 8,095 acres in County Cavan and 1,014 acres in County Meath. This was inherited by Mervyn and Madeline Pratt’s only son Joseph who in turn passed the properties on to his elder son, another Mervyn: the younger boy, Lieutenant Colonel Audley Pratt was killed during the First World War. Born in 1873, Mervyn Pratt was badly wounded during the Boer War and retired from the King’s Royal Rifle Corps with the rank of Captin in 1910; he was subsequently promoted to Major. On his father’s death, he moved to Enniscoe and remained there unmarried until his own death in 1950. At that date the County Mayo property was inherited by a cousin, Professor Jack Nicholson, head of the Veterinary College of Ireland and his wife Patita, whose father had been one of the Bourkes of Heathfield House, County Mayo (a family of which Ireland’s first woman President, Mary Robinson was also a member). Enniscoe in turn passed to their daughter Susan Kellett who now lives there with her son, DJ Kellett.

The particular pleasure of Enniscoe lies in its discretion: there is nothing braggartly about the house which sits at ease within the surrounding landscape. Patita Nicholson, a talented artist too little known, painted many scenes featuring the property (such as that at the top of this page). All of them show Enniscoe’s roughcast walls washed a gentle pink, this colour contrasting with the intense green of the immediate meadows and woodlands. Aside from a tripartite entrance doorframe, the exterior of the building is plain and the interiors likewise devoid of superfluous decoration except for occasional flourishes such as the plasterwork frieze running around the base of the staircase lantern. The sensible caution of earlier generations towards spending money unnecessarily means Enniscoe has remained relatively unchanged over the past two centuries. In the drawing room, for example, the wall paper probably dates from the 1830s when Madeline Jackson married Mervyn Pratt and the couple undertook some redecoration, although after almost two hundred years the original pale blue has faded to a dusty rose. And for nearly double that amount of time the house has never been sold but instead passed on from one branch of the same family to the next. The character this unbroken continuity gives to a house cannot be artificially replicated, but can – and in other houses has been – forever lost. There are few remaining examples in Ireland of somewhere grown quite so comfortable in its own skin, long may Enniscoe continue to do so.

Enniscoe and its owners today welcome guests. For more information, please see http://www.enniscoe.com

When it’s Gone, It’s Gone

Sep8

‘The interior of the house is quite a curiosity. The walls, staircase, and bedrooms, are all covered with tapestry – even the ceilings of the staircases and passages. Some of it is very good, especially that in the drawing room, which once adorned the palace of the Tuileries.
The rooms abound with objects of virtù, and the ceilings of some are covered with paintings which formed the plafond of a palace at Venice. Most of the doors are covered with that stamped and gilded leather which was formerly so extensively used to decorate the palaces of Spain. The dining room has a very rich buffet, which reaches nearly to the ceiling. Some of the ornaments are in brass, and belonged to a Spanish convent. They consist of five or six large dishes, with embossed figures very finely executed. A curious old bust of Saint Patrick is in the centre.
Some beautiful stained glass, also from a Spanish convent, is placed in the windows of this room, the walls of which are covered in pictures instead of tapestry. Some of these pictures are very good, and have frames of richly carved oak. I remarked a curious vase, which is covered with coins of Henry III. They were found in Lord Berehaven’s grounds, and placed, I believe, by himself in this very fanciful and very ornamental manner. In the drawing-room, amongst many other beautiful and interesting objects, there is a curious old book-stand, of an octagon shape, forming a table at the top, which is embellished with old miniatures set into the carving.
The collection was made by Lord Berehaven during his travels. For fourteen years he usually made an annual tour abroad, having the decoration of his house constantly in view. How delightful it would be for Ireland if many more of its young Peers followed Lord Berehaven’s example, and brought back with them from the foreign lands which they visited choice works of art and taste to enrich their own!’
From Rambles In The South Of Ireland During The Year 1838 by Lady Chatterton.

In the late 17th century Captain Richard White, member of a Limerick mercantile and mayoral family, settled on Whiddy, the largest island in Bantry Bay, County Cork. He and his descendants seem to have prospered, it is believed through their involvement in a variety of activities including pilchard fishing, iron smelting and, most probably, smuggling. The National Library of Ireland archives contain an article of transfer of lands dated 1717 showing that even at this date the Whites were acquiring property on the mainland at Bantry. Here 1720 a house called Blackrock was built by the Hutchinson family which for some time had been leasing the property from the Earls of Anglesey. This building, of five bays and three storeys, forms the core of what is now known as Bantry House: in the early 1760s it passed into the ownership of the second Richard White, born on Whiddy in 1701, and thus the family moved from their island residence, White noting in his account book, ‘…this farm would set for upwards of £56, but I think no lease ought to be made thereof least any of my family should live at Blackrock, in which Case that farm would be a most convenient Domean.’
In 1734 the second Richard, who was called to the Irish Bar where he made a considerable fortune, had married Martha Davis. Her father, the Very Rev Rowland Davis was Dean of Cork and Ross. Their son, Simon White, born in 1739, likewise studied law, was called to the English Bar but did not practice. Instead he, like his own heir, seems to have concentrated on increasing the size of its estate so that before the end of the century the Whites were the greatest landowners in this part of the country. In 1766 Simon White married Frances Jane Hedges Eyre of Macroom Castle, and the following year their first son – another Richard – was born.

The third Richard White would today most likely only be remembered for having taken part in a schoolboy rebellion against the headmaster while at Harrow, had he not unexpectedly become involved in an important incident in Irish history. On achieving his majority, he settled at Bantry and seems to have concentrated on consolidating and improving his inheritance.
However in December 1796 a fleet of 43 ships carrying in the region of 16,000 French soldiers under the command of General Hoche and accompanied by the United Irishman Wolfe Tone set sail from Brest with the intention of invading this country. The fleet encountered terrible weather en route, was split up, and on Christmas Eve just sixteen vessels and 6,000 men reached Bere Island in Bantry Bay. Hearing of their arrival, Richard White sent out a small boat with ten men on board to ascertain the intentions of these unexpected visitors: they were not seen again. As a result, White sent word of the threatened invasion to British army headquarters in Cork city, organised the local Bantry Cavalry (the standard of which still hangs in Bantry House’s entrance hall) and placed his home at the disposal of the military. General Dalrymple duly arrived from Cork and everyone prepared for a tremendous fight. It never happened because the French vessels, ill-prepared for Irish winter weather, were driven out of the bay by another storm on December 28th. ‘We were,’ wrote a crushed Wolfe Tone in his journal, ‘close enough to toss a biscuit ashore.’
But all was not yet over. On New Year’s Eve another group of French ships, also part of the scattered armada, arrived in Bantry Bay and attacked two merchant vessels, one American, the other English. But they did little else and on January 4th when a local trader boldly went out to sell the sailors some produce, he advised there were some 20,000 members of the military on shore (in fact, there were only 400). He also warned that Lord Bridport, commander of the Channel Fleet, was close at hand, whereas news of the threatened invasion had only reached London on December 31st. The French, separated from their commander and suffering from acute sea sickness, lost whatever remained of their urge to invade Ireland and ignominiously headed back to their own country. In March 1797, ‘in consideration of the zeal and loyalty he displayed…during a period of great trouble,’ Richard White was raised to the peerage as Baron Bantry. In 1800 he was made a Viscount, and in 1816 Earl of Bantry.

In 1799 Lord Bantry married Lady Margaret Hare, daughter of the first Earl of Listowel and with a fortune of £30,000. Their first child, a son christened Richard, was born in 1800 and, after his father became an earl, was known by the courtesy title Viscount Berehaven. In character he was very different from his parent, a man happy to live on his own estate in a remote part of Ireland. Indeed, long before his death in 1851 Lord Bantry had handed over responsibility for Bantry House to his heir and retired to a rustic lodge he had built at Glengarriff some eight miles away.
Both before and after his marriage in 1836 to Lady Mary O’Brien, a daughter of the second Marquis of Thomond, Lord Berehaven embarked on extensive travels throughout Europe and even as far as Russia. In the course of these journeys he acquired countless items of furniture, paintings, tapestries and objets d’art with which to embellish Bantry House. The building had been extended by his father with the addition of a two-storey, six bay front overlooking Bantry Bay; this contains a pair of bow-ended drawing rooms with bedrooms above. In the mid-1840s the house was further enlarged by Lord Berehaven who added a fourteen-bay block to the rear, comprising a six-bay centre of two storeys over basement flanked by four-storey bow-ended wings. The exterior was given coherence by a sequence of giant red-brick pilasters with Coade-stone Corinthian capitals, the intervening spaces filled by grey stucco and the whole topped by a parapet with stone balustrade. In addition, no doubt inspired by their travels, during the 1850s Lord and Lady Berehaven laid out the elaborate Italianate gardens, including the terraces focussed on the stone Hundred Steps set amidst azaleas and rhododendron behind the house and, at its base, a south-facing parterre surrounding a wisteria circle centred on a fountain. An immense winter garden (now gone) accessed via the library was also added.

The description provided by Lady Chatterton above gives an idea of how Bantry House looked even before it was enlarged by Lord Berehaven, who finally became second Earl of Bantry on his father’s death, aged 84, in 1851. The rooms were crammed with outstanding examples of Spanish leather and brasswork, French tapestries, Italian paintings and much more besides. The second earl seems to have been an obsessive collector and an eccentric decorator, working on the more-is-more principle and inclined to heap one item on top of another so that the eventual effect must have been overwhelming, not least because of ceilings covered in either tapestries or canvases. The black and white photographs, probably dating from around a century ago or so, offer us a sense of the interiors as he had left them.
We have other, more recent, accounts of the house. For example, Geoffrey Shelswell-White (father of the late Egerton Shelswell-White) wrote in 1951 of Italy being ‘represented by stained glass, ceiling paintings from a Venetian Palace, and plaster-work executed by Italian craftsmen said to have been brought to Bantry expressly for the purpose. A Russian household shrine contains 15th and 16th Century icons. There is stained and painted glass from Switzerland and France, Germany and Flanders, and specimens of Cork, Waterford and ruby-coloured Bohemian glass. Among the French pieces, which are the most numerous, those having special interest are a pair of bookcases and a work table reputed to have been the property of Marie-Antoinette, and fireplaces which are thought to have come from the Petit Trianon at Versailles.
Lord Bantry’s outstanding contribution, however, was unquestionably the collection of tapestries that adorn the walls of several of the rooms. With the exception of a set, 17th Century Dutch in origin, the panels are French having come from the workshops of Gobelins, Beauvais and Aubusson in the late 18th Century. One Gobelins panel is said to have hung in the Palace of Versailles and there is a particularly beautiful rose-coloured set of Aubusson which is said to have been made by order of Louis XV for Marie Antoinette on her marriage to the Dauphin of France. Two other panels formed part of the Royal Garde Meuble of the Tuileries.’

The second Earl of Bantry had no children – in a sense the house was his offspring – and so when he died in 1868 the title and property passed to his brother William. The third earl had five daughters and one son, William Henry Hare Hedges-White who in 1884 became fourth Earl of Bantry. However he only survived until 1891 and, although married, had no children so that on his death the title became extinct. Bantry was inherited by Edward Egerton Leigh, son of the fourth earl’s eldest sister Elizabeth. He duly changed his surname to Leigh-White and when he died in 1920 Bantry passed to his elder daughter Clodagh whose husband Geoffrey Shelswell likewise took the White name to become Shelswell-White. The latter worked for the British Colonial Service but following the outbreak of the Second World War his wife and children moved into Bantry where the house was used by the Irish Army until the return of peace in 1945. A year later Clodagh Bantry House opened to the public, the first historic property in the Republic to take this step. In her book The Big House in Ireland, Valerie Pakenham remembers being taken around Bantry in the 1960s by Clodagh Shelswell-White ‘swathed splendidly in two fur coats, and observing with fascination a large Nescafe tin filled with pot-pourri among the family silver.’ On her death in 1978 responsibility for the house passed to Egerton Shelswell-White who in turn died in December 2012.
Over the preceding century or more, Bantry’s resources had been steadily depleted. It is clear that the second earl’s lavish expenditure on the house was not without consequences: in November 1853, over 33,000 acres of the Bantry estate were offered for sale in the Encumbered Estates Court, and a separate sale disposed of Bere Island. The following year more than 6,000 further acres were sold, again through the Encumbered Estates Court. Nevertheless in the 1870s the third earl still owned 69,500 acres of land in County Cork. Within decades most of this had gone: by March 1916 Edward Egerton Leigh-White had accepted an offer from the Congested Districts’ Board had been accepted for 61,589 tenanted acres of the estate. What remained was thereafter sold until a mere hundred acres remained. Meanwhile the vast house continued to demand large sums to be spent on its maintenance, money that could only come from the gradual sale of its contents.

In the first half of the last century, the author Stephen Gwynn described the contents of Bantry House as being ‘the Wallace Collection of Ireland.’ It is, however, impossible to imagine the British government and people would have watched with disinterest while the Wallace Collection was piecemeal broken up and sold; there would have been state intervention and support to keep such a valuable resource within the country. Such is the difference between our two nations. Successive owners of Bantry House have been forced to dispose of their assets in order to keep a roof on the building they struggled to preserve. The greater part of a remarkable collection assembled by the second Earl of Bantry, which ought to have enhanced the Irish patrimony, has instead been allowed to be lost forever, most of it leaving the country. In the summer 2014 issue of the Irish Arts Review, for example, Peter Murray writes a scrupulous account of certain dealers’ scurrilous behaviour which resulted in a series of eight canvases painted in Venice by the Guardi brothers in the 18th century and installed on the ceiling of Bantry House’s dining room, being removed not just from the building but from the state, and sold for a fraction of their worth even at the time.
It may come as a surprise to readers to learn that there is legislation in place which requires licences to be sought for the export of art works from Ireland, this being the Documents and Pictures (Regulation of Export) Act dating as far back as 1945 and supplemented by the National Cultural Institutions Act of 1997. In theory this legislation means the export of any item over a certain fairly low value has to be approved by government-appointed authorities; in practice one suspects – as in so many other areas of Irish life – the law is more honoured in the breach than the observance. The situation is not helped by lack of basic knowledge of what is and isn’t here. For example, any work that appears on the Register of Cultural Objects cannot leave the country without first being given a licence. In 2005 this register was extended to cover all cultural objects, but to-date the list continues to comprise items from certain state institutions like the National Gallery of Ireland. There is no inventory of cultural objects in this country. Thus we cannot be certain what remains here, what has been sold, what might go in the coming days or weeks or months. We don’t know what we have, which makes it impossible to know what we have to lose.
What we do know, on the other hand, is that on October 21st next the final portions of Ireland’s Wallace Collection – which can be seen in the pictures above – will be auctioned and most likely depart Ireland forever. So far the Irish state has shown itself unconcerned that this should be so, indifferent that another part of what ought to be our collective inheritance will disappear, untroubled that the region around Bantry – which is heavily dependent on tourism – will be deprived of a valuable attraction for visitors. In May 1976, the contents of Malahide Castle, Dublin were sold as a result of state stupidity; almost forty years and many more country house sales later, nothing seems to have changed. It is time to understand that our cultural heritage is not a renewable asset: when it’s gone, it’s gone.

A Man of Acton

Aug30

Over the chimney piece in the dining room at Ballyfin, County Laois, an oil of Mary Anne, Lady Acton and her children painted in 1809 by the neo-classical artist Robert Fagan. Lady Acton’s husband, Sir John Acton, commander of the naval forces of Grand Duchy of Tuscany and prime minister of Naples in the late 18th century, was also her uncle: the couple had been permitted to marry by papal dispensation. The boy holding a bird to the right was their younger son, Charles Januarius Acton who, after being educated in England, returned to Italy where he became a priest. In 1837 Pope Gregory XVI made him Auditor to the Apostolic Chamber and two years later he became a cardinal. However, never very strong, he died in 1847 at the age of forty-four. Incidentally his nephew was the historian Lord Acton, best remembered for the observation, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.’ This was certainly not true of Cardinal Acton.

New Blood for New Hall

Aug25

County Clare folklore tells how a member of the O’Brien family living in a large house close to Killone Lake noticed supplies of wine in his cellar were being inexplicably depleted. Convinced there was a thief and determined to catch the culprit, one night he stayed up late and discovered the perpetrator was a mermaid who swam upstream to the house from the lake. Recovering from his surprise, he shot the creature and wounded her (in other versions a servant scalded her badly with a pot of boiling water). Bleeding profusely and screaming in pain, she fled back to her habitual abode, but not before delivering a curse: ‘As the mermaid goes on the sea/So shall the race of O’Briens pass away/Till they leave Killone in wild weeds.’ It was also said that every seven years the lake turned red, an evocation of the mermaid’s blood. This was among the legends collected and published over a century ago by Thomas Johnson Westropp who noted, ‘The lake, like the stream already noted at Caherminaun, turns red at times from iron scum and red clay after a dry summer. This is supposed to be caused by the local Undine’s blood, and to foretell a change of occupants in Newhall. Strange to say, I saw it happen last when the place was let by MacDonnells to the O’Briens. The cellar at Newhall has its outer section roofed with large slabs, and the inner consists of long, low, cross vaults. In the end of the innermost recess is a built-up square patch, which sound hollow, and is said to show the opening closed to keep out the thievish mermaid.’

Around 1190 Domnall Mór O’Brien, King of Thomond, founded an Augustinian nunnery dedicated to St John the Baptist by the banks of Killone Lake. The house thereafter seems to have been under the care of successive members of the same family: in 1260 it was written that ‘Slaney, O’Brien’s daughter, abbesse of Kill Eoni, chiefs in devotion, almes-deedes and hospitality of all women in Munster, died. The King of Heaven be prosperous to her soule.’ Slaney was sister to Donchad Cairbrech, King of Thomond, founder of Ennis Friary. There are relatively few other references to the nunnery thereafter until it was dissolved in the 16th century and passed into ownership of the crown. A story from this period tells how Honora O’Brien had become a member of the religious community at Killone but then ran away with Sir Roger O’Shaughnessy of Gort, and by him had a son and daughter before receiving a papal dispensation for their marriage. Although the last nuns had gone before the end of the century, the site’s link with its founding family remained because by 1617 Killone and the surrounding land were in the possession of Dermod O’Brien, fifth Baron Inchiquin.

Perhaps it took some time for the mermaid’s curse to be realised but finally in 1764 Charles MacDonnell bought the lands on which the ruins of Killone stood. Descended from the MacDonnells of Dunluce, County Antrim, one of his forebears had been deprived of land even before Sir Randal MacDonnell, head of this branch of the family, was attainted in 1691 for supporting James II. His brother Daniel MacDonnell, whose mother had been Mary O’Brien, a daughter of Sir Donough O’Brien, left Antrim and settled instead in Kilkee, County Clare where he was able to acquire property from a kinsman Connor O’Brien, second Viscount Clare. There he married another member of the O’Brien clan (the two families were to intermarry over the next several generations), this being Penelope daughter of Teige O’Brien of Dough. In the closing decades of the 17th century their son Captain James MacDonnell first supported the Jacobite side and then switched allegiance, and as a result of this change of loyalty held on to his estates. The forfeited properties of his cousin the third Viscount Clare were granted to the Dutch Williamite General Arnold Joost van Keppel, first Earl of Albemarle. Since he was not interested in County Clare, in 1698 Albemarle sold over 30,000 acres to a syndicate of local men including James MacDonnell who went on to buy additional land in the area. On his death in 1714 he was succeeded by his son Charles James who fourteen years later married Elizabeth, daughter of Christopher O’Brien of Ennistymon. Likewise in 1760 their only son Charles married Catherine O’Brien, third daughter of Sir Edward O’Brien of Dromoland. The MacDonnell house in Kilkee was destroyed by fire in 1762 and so two years later Charles MacDonnell, who would become a Member of Parliament first for Clare (1765) and then for the Borough of Ennis (1768), bought the Killone estate land from another cousin, Edward O’Brien of Ennistymon. This property included an existing long house known as New Hall.

It appears that soon after acquiring New Hall, Charles MacDonnell enlarged the existing house by the addition of a block built at right angles to and extending further on either side of the old, so creating a T-shape. In the April-September 1967 Irish Georgian Society Bulletin, the Knight of Glin attributed the design of this extension to County Clare gentleman painter and architect Francis Bindon. ‘The facade,’ he wrote, ‘which fronts an older house, is built of beautiful pink brick like Carnelly [another Clare house believed to have been designed by Bindon], but it is composed with a central balustraded and urned octangular bow window incorporating a pedimented front door. On each side are two windows to a floor with single keystones, though the windows on the ground floor have been enlarged at a later date. Surmounting the second floor windows are labelled panels in brick. At either end of the house are bow windows and the whole house with its massive cornice and roof makes a highly effective and well conceived arrangement.
The front door leads into an elongated octagonal hall with a heavy Doric frieze, the metopes composed of delicious grinning masks, bukrania and the MacDonnell crest. The climax, and main feature of this hall, is a magnificent concave sided organ case that takes up the end of the room. It is actually only a cupboard. To the left and right of the hall lie the dining-room and drawing-room, the latter having elaborate plasterwork, festoons and frames probably executed by the same craftsman as the drawing-room at Carnelly…’

For almost fifty years the Knight of Glin’s crediting Bindon with the design of New Hall’s front section has been accepted. Should this continue to be the case? In the absence of documents all attributions to Bindon must be speculative. However, New Hall lacks those external features judged most typically Bindon-esque and found in other buildings deemed to be from his hand such as Woodstock (see Of Wonderous Beauty did the Vision Seem, May 13th 2013), Bessborough (see In the Borough of Bess and Back to Bessborough, November 25th and December 2nd 2013) and John’s Square, Limerick (see When New Becomes Old, March 24th last). What might almost be considered the architect’s tics, not least the facade having a central curved niche on the first floor and a blind oculus on the second, are not found at New Hall. Instead the house presents such striking elements as raised brick panels, like arched eyebrows, above the first floor windows, and full-length bows at either end of the structure.
There is much about the entire building which remains a tantalising mystery. The original house (behind the brick extension) can be seen above in a photograph taken from the far side of the stable yard. Built of rubble and then rendered (before being given a pink wash to blend better with the addition’s brick), one suspects it was a typical 17th century long house that terminated at the cut-stone quoins; the attic dormer windows must be a relatively recent intervention since they do not appear in old photographs. Taking advantage of the view down to Killone Lake, the front part of the house was duly added by the first MacDonnells to live here in the mid-1760s. Then at a later date a further addition was made to the rear of the building, its fenestration markedly different from that of the other back section. Perhaps it was at this time also that the windows on the ground floor of the facade were lowered to increase light into the main rooms. And surely the stone balustrade and urns that top the central canted bow were incorporated at a later date?
New Hall’s interior similarly throws up many unresolved questions, the most obvious being when and why a large ‘organ’ was constructed between the two doors at the far end of the octagonal entrance hall. Its design bears similarities to the instrument designed by Lord Gerald FitzGerald in 1857 and installed in the former dining room at Carton, County Kildare. However, unlike that intervention the New Hall organ is simply a storage cupboard, one that overwhelms the space and detracts attention from the fine cornice plasterwork. For the present, and unless fresh information turns up this house’s architectural history must remain the subject of speculation.

The Charles MacDonnell responsible for buying the New Hall, formerly Killone, estate died in 1773 and was succeeded by his son, likewise called Charles and an MP, both in the Irish Parliament and, after the Act of Union, briefly sitting in that at Westminster. He was also a soldier who fought with Lord Rawdon during the American Revolutionary War. He had two sons, neither of whom appear to have produced heirs and thus following the death of John MacDonnell in 1850, the estate passed to the latter’s nephew, William Edward Armstrong, whose father William Henry Armstrong, who lived at Mount Heaton, King’s County (now Offaly), had married Bridget MacDonnell. William Edward assumed by Royal Licence the surname and arms of MacDonnell and was, in turn, succeeded by his son, Charles Randal MacDonnell. At this date, the estate amounted to some 6,670 acres in County Clare but in 1912 3,485 acres of tenanted and 256 acres of untenanted land was sold to the Congested Districts’ Board in October 1912 for more than £26,000. Within a decade the family had gone altogether and New Hall passed into the ownership of the Joyce family, originally from neighbouring County Galway. Following the death of Patrick Francis Joyce three years ago, the house has been offered for sale and seeks a fresh owner. This is without question a fascinating building, full of mystery about its origins and evolution and meriting the utmost care as a rare example of 18th century regional architecture in the west of Ireland. New blood for New Hall: whence will it come?

Going, Going, Gone

Aug23

Above is a photograph of the library at Bantry House, County Cork taken in the early 1970s for Irish Houses and Castles by Desmond Guinness and William Ryan. With its marble columns and pilasters topped by gilded Corinthian capitals below a compartmented ceiling, the room is part of the enlargement of the building undertaken by the second Earl of Bantry in the 1840s. Below is a photograph taken from much the same point and showing the room today: as is widely known, many of its remaining contents, along with those elsewhere in the house, are due to be sold this autumn.
I shall be speaking of Bantry House next Tuesday, August 26th when, as part of Heritage Week, I am giving a talk on Some Irish Houses and Demesnes at the Market House, Monaghan at 8pm, admission is free. For more information, see: http://www.heritageweek.ie/whats-on/event-details?EventID=296

A Votary

Aug20

Plasterwork decoration in a recessed niche in the dining room of Bracklyn, County Westmeath. The house was built c.1790 by a branch of the Fetherston-Haugh family on land acquired from the Pakenhams in the same county. It occupies the site of a 15th century castle, some of which may have been incorporated into Bracklyn, which in keeping with the taste of the period has chaste neo-classical interiors throughout, as can also be seen below in this detail of an archway in the staircase hall.

Leaving the Empty Room

Aug18

Leaving the Empty Room
Stephen Dunn

The door had a double lock,
and the joke was on me.
You might call it protection
against self, this joke,
and it wasn’t very funny:
I kept the door locked
in order to think twice.

The room itself: knickknacks,
chairs, and a couch,
the normal accoutrements.
And yet it was an empty room,
if you know what I mean.
I had a ticket in my head:
Anytime, it said, another joke.

How I wished I had a deadline
to leave the empty room,
or that the corridor outside
would show itself
to be a secret tunnel, perhaps
a winding path. Maybe I needed
a certain romance of departure
to kick in, as if I were waiting
for magic instead of courage,
or something else
I didn’t have. No doubt
you’re wondering if other people
inhabited the empty room.
Of course. What’s true emptiness
without other people?

I thought twice many times.
But when I left, I can’t say
I made a decision. I just followed
my body out the door,
one quick step after another,
even as the room started to fill
with what I’d been sure wasn’t there.

All photographs of New Hall, County Clare about which more next week.

Episcopal Elegance

Aug16

Detail of a chimneypiece in the first floor drawing room of the former Bishop’s Palace in Waterford city. This building was designed c.1741 by Richard Castle and constructed on the site of a mediaeval Episcopal residence: it continued to serve this purpose until the last century and underwent various changes of use until restored in recent years and opened as a museum. Since the original chimneypieces were lost at some date, care has been taken to find appropriate replacements. This example, of Carrara white and Siena marble, came from the workshop of the Darley family in Dublin; its centre tablet feauring dolphin-handled ewers is similar to a design published by Sir William Chambers who, of course, was the architect responsible for Charlemont House and the Casino at Marino outside Dublin. Waterford Bishop’s Palace is currently hosting an exhibition on the local Roberts family, several members of which were notable artists and architects in the 18th century.

Pop into the Pop Up

Aug2

Not necessarily the best photograph to have been shown here, but it gives some idea of an exhibition currently running at 5 Rutland Street, Limerick. The house dates from the 1770s and is one of a terrace that marks both chronologically and literally the onset of the city’s Newtown Pery district. After serving as a butcher’s shop, in recent years the premises – like its neighbours – has stood empty and neglected. However, overseen by conservation architect Cáit ni Cheallachain and historian Dr Ursula Callaghan, and as part of the local Irish Georgian Society chapter’s contribution to Limerick City of Culture leaks have been fixed, an outbreak of dry rot arrested, wallpaper stripped, paintwork cleaned (including all the staircase banisters), and the entire site given a fresh purpose: as a Pop Up Museum exploring aspects of Limerick’s rich cultural heritage from the Georgian era. This is an imaginative and exciting initiative showing what can be done in a building that otherwise risked becoming further prey to vandalism and decay. The Pop Up Museum is open at weekends from 10am to 5pm and on Wednesday evenings from 4pm to 9pm and runs until the end of this month: pop in while you can.

The Fair Place

Jul21

The name Ballyfin derives from the Irish An Baile Fionn, meaning the fair place, and it’s an apt description for the house and estate in County Laois which now bear that name. Originally this part of the country was under the control of the O’More clan, but like so many others they were displaced of their lands during the settlement period in the 16th century. Laois was one of two counties created by Queen Mary in 1556 when it was called Queen’s County (and its main town, now Portlaoise, was Maryborough) and by the early decades of the following century Ballyfin had passed into the control of Sir Piers Crosby who is said to have built a castle here. In the disturbances of the 1640s, however, Crosby lost this territory when it came into the ownership of one Periam Pole, younger son of the Devonshire antiquarian Sir William Pole. In turn his son, likewise called Periam, would be confirmed as being in possession of the land, part of a larger estate of some 3,500 acres.
His son William Pole succeeded him in 1704 and some time later pulled down the old Crosby castle, replacing it with a more commodious house, these changes being described by a nephew as ‘grand and expensive and his designs were elegant, as his gardens show.’ But the expenditure meant that by 1727, the same relation would comment that William Pole ‘died worth no ready money between his improving Ballyfin and his wife’s going constantly every winter to Dublin.’ His elder son, another Periam – who undertook restoration on the house following a fire – died childless in 1748 and so the estate went to his sibling, another William Pole. The latter and his wife Lady Sarah Moore, a daughter of the fifth Earl of Drogheda, greatly developed Ballyfin’s parkland: in May 1759 Emily, Countess of Kildare could write to her husband, ‘Yesterday I saw a most delightful place indeed, much beyond any place I have seen in Ireland – Ballyfin…There is a piece of water there very like what I fancy ours will be, only broader; fine plantations and the greatest variety of trees and flowers almost that I ever saw anywhere.’ Over 250 years later Lady Kildare’s description remains apt.

In addition to the grounds, William and Lady Sarah Pole also carried out work on the house built by his father, including ‘an elegant and commodious square of offices’ and, in 1778, an extension to the building that provided a new entrance hall and series of reception rooms. In 1784 William Ashford painted a number of views of Ballyfin which provide us with an idea of its appearance at the time; one of these pictures was engraved by Thomas Milton and published in 1787 in his Views of Seats in Ireland. The house is shown across the lake created by the Poles, a fourteen-bay elevation conforming to Milton’s description of it as ‘plain and modern-built’, the result being ‘an excellent family mansion’ with rooms ‘large and commodious, fitted up with taste’. Another engraving of the same building in 1794 shows its uneven façade and provides confirmation that the owners were planning still further developments. On the other hand, as was so often the case in Ireland, ambition outstripped income and it is apparent the Poles were heavily indebted by the time of their deaths in 1780 and 1781 respectively. Still, they were determined the improvements they had undertaken should not be dissipated, William Pole declaring in his will that ‘the person for the time being who shall enjoy my mansion house and demesne of Ballyfin shall engage and employ a skilful gardiner at the salary of one hundred pounds Sterling a year to attend and take care of the improvements…so as to keep and preserve the same in good and compleat order, repair and condition.’

Like his elder brother William Pole had no children, and therefore Ballyfin passed to a godson and great-nephew, William Wellesley, whose father was the music-loving first Earl of Mornington and whose younger brother would become the great Duke of Wellington. Wellesley’s inheritance came with the proviso that he adopt the name Pole, and so he became William Wellesley-Pole. Although he spent time in this country as Chief Secretary for Ireland between 1809 and 1812 and as Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer during part of the same period, Wellesley-Pole, who would be made first Baron Maryborough in 1821 (and on the death of another brother in 1842 become third Earl of Mornington), spent the greater part of his career in England. In 1813 he offered his Irish estate for sale, a fortunate move since it would otherwise have been squandered by his eldest son.
This gentleman was one of the most notorious rakes of the early 19th century. Born William Wellesley-Pole, in 1812 shortly before marrying for the first time he added the surname of his heiress fiancée, thus becoming William Pole-Tylney-Long-Wellesley. The unfortunate bride, Catherine Tylney-Long, at the time generally called ‘The Wiltshire Heiress’ was believed to be the richest commoner in England, with estates providing an annual rental income of £40,000 per annum and financial investments worth £300,000. Her husband, on the other hand, had only debts and within a decade was forced to flee to mainland Europe to evade his creditors. His last years were spent in London, living on a weekly pension of ₤10 provided by his cousin Arthur Wellesley, second Duke of Wellington. On his death in July 1857, the Morning Chronicle obituarist summarised him as follows: ‘A spendthrift, a profligate, and a gambler in his youth, he became debauched in his manhood… redeemed by no single virtue, adorned by no single grace, his life gone out even without a flicker of repentance.’

Instead of being frittered away by William Pole-Tylney-Long-Wellesley, the Ballyfin estate changed hands in 1813 when it was bought by Sir Charles Henry Coote, premier Baronet of Ireland. The first of his family to come to Ireland had been an earlier Charles Coote, like Periam Pole originally from Devonshire. As a young soldier he came to this country to make his fortune and was eventually rewarded with large grants of land as well as a lifetime possession of several valuable state offices. He died in 1642 during the Confederate Wars and was succeeded by his son Charles who supported Oliver Cromwell but, after the latter’s death, championed the restoration of Charles II and was thus granted the title of Earl of Mountrath. This title passed down through successive generations until the death in 1802 of the childless seventh earl who left his Mountrath estate of some 50,000 acres to a kinsman, Charles Henry Coote, then a ten-year old schoolboy. The property was held in trust until he came of age, conveniently just as Ballyfin was offered for sale and a year before his marriage to Caroline Whaley (a niece of the famous Irish gambler Thomas ‘Buck’ Whaley).
Although the Cootes had been considerable landowners in Queen’s County since the early 17th century, they do not appear to have had a significant residence there. The ruins survive of two houses associated with the family, Castle Cuffe, built by the first Sir Charles Coote and named after his wife Dorothea Cuffe, and Rush Hall, but neither was in use by the time the ninth baronet came into his inheritance. Therefore it made sense to acquire an existing estate, especially one such as Ballyfin which had benefitted from the attention of successive earlier owners. He and his new wife settled here and when the place was visited by Atkinson in 1815, he reported in The Irish Tourist, ‘The dwelling-house of Ballyfin is a large building in the form of a half-square, it has an aspect of neatness and extent, but in its exterior appearance nothing very ornamental or magnificent. The rooms, however, which I saw, were spacious and furnished in a stile of elegance suitable to the place. Under this head may be classed, as an article of the first consideration, a rich and valuable collection of paintings, the work of eminent artists.’

It was perhaps because they required a better setting for their collection of ‘rich and valuable’ paintings that in the early 1820s the Cootes decided to embark on a rebuilding programme at Ballyfin. It would appear that the initial intention was to remodel and extend the existing structure, using the services of a relatively unknown architect called Dominick Madden (he would go on to design several Roman Catholic cathedrals in the west of Ireland). However, here as elsewhere Madden ran into trouble with his clients – in 1810 he had been dismissed from a position with the Board of Works for ‘irregular conduct’ including the theft of furniture from the Vice-Regal Lodge – and was replaced by the ubiquitous Morrisons, Richard and his son William Vitruvius. They proposed an entirely new scheme that even involved the demolition of Madden’s recently completed library and vestibule, and somehow succeeded in persuading Sir Charles Coote to go along with their plans.
As Kevin V Mulligan wrote in a 2005 article on the house, ‘The detail and quality of finishes in the executed building, indicate that the Morrisons’ skills in spatial planning and decorative design were matched only by their powers of persuasion. The wealth of materials available to the Morrisons is seen in the ability to execute all the elevations in smooth sandstone ashlar. The conservatory, a feature represented in the Morrisons’ earliest proposals, seems to have been the only element sacrificed until Richard Turner’s fragile curvilinear glass cell was added sometime after 1855. Internally, a stunning collection of scagliola columns included the most expensive that could be obtained from the Lambeth works of William Croggon who almost certainly provided them here, represented by the imitation verde antico Corinthian columns that contribute to the imperial grandeur of the saloon. Elsewhere, endless mahogany for doors and bookcases and an assorted range of exotic woods used to remarkable effect in the parquetry floors constituted more expensive materials; added to this were the contents of seven packing cases sent from Italy in 1821 through the agency of the artist Gaspare Gabrielli which may have included the matching chimneypieces with Bacchanalian friezes that now serve the saloon and dining room or indeed the Roman mosaic set into the stone floor of the entrance hall. But all of this barely compares with the wealth of artistry available in the craftsmen who fashioned these materials, especially those who modelled and cast the extraordinary stuccowork, an eclectic decorative display that remains the principal glory of Ballyfin.’

Ballyfin remained in the ownership of the Cootes for just over 100 years before steeply declining income, the loss of the estate to the Land Commission and changing political circumstances obliged the family to sell. In 1928 the house and demesne were acquired by the Patrician Brothers for £10,000, only a fraction of what it had cost to build the Morrison-designed property a century before. The religious order operated a boarding school on the premises until they in turn announced an intention to sell in September 2001. After visiting Ballyfin the following January, I wrote that by this date some of the rooms had become ‘barely habitable, because in recent years the house has suffered from water seeping through the roof and into the building. A corner of the ground-floor drawing-room, for example, shows evidence of serious damage from this problem.’ While problems with the roof had been stabilised, ‘more costly work is still required on the parapets and corbels. Then money will need to be spent elsewhere on the building, taking care of those sections which have been ruined by damp as well as rescuing such features as the saloon’s marquetry floor, areas of which have become dislodged, and the unique glass and iron conservatory dating from the 1850s and believed to have been designed by Richard Turner…And the grounds are also suffering from a shortage of funds for their upkeep: trees need to be thinned or felled, while other sections of the woodlands should be replanted; the grottoes and follies, including a 19th-century “medieval” observation tower, are suffering; and one of the neo-classical gate lodges is almost derelict. Remarkable and deserving of support as Ballyfin may be, the question must be asked: who can or will come to its salvation?’
Amazingly, a new owner did come forward to save Ballyfin and to undertake the slow and costly programme of restoration that the house required. Work began in 2002 and continued until 2010, meticulous, methodical and almost without equal in this country. Ballyfin then reopened as an hotel, but not – as is too often the case – with its parkland despoiled and its interiors butchered. On the contrary, the sensitivity of the house’s present owners and the skills of the team they assembled to resuscitate the property means that this is one of the finest restoration projects undertaken in Ireland in the past century. As a result Ballyfin today once more lives up to its name of being the fair place.

For this week’s account I am much indebted to Kevin V Mulligan’s excellent 2011 publication, Ballyfin: The Restoration of an Irish House & Demesne.
Ballyfin is now a superlatively luxurious hotel, for more information see: http://www.ballyfin.com

The Irish Aesthete

This is not an Oxymoron

Tag Archives: Historic Interiors