Tag Archives: Historic Interiors

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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On the Hill of the Fairies


In 1897 Edith Leeson Marshall married Sir Home Gordon, 12th (and last) baronet of Embo. A passionate cricketer, Sir Home wrote extensively on the sport although he never seems to have been an outstanding player. His wife Edith, descended from the first Earl of Milltown, was the youngest child of Richard and Rebecca Leeson Marshall, an evangelical Christian couple. Her father had inherited from his uncle an estate in County Kerry called Callinafercy and there built a comfortable, unpretentious villa for his family, the place later described by his daughter as ‘a house without a redeeming feature.’ But he died when Edith was only aged seven and her widowed mother moved about mainland Europe before settling in Richmond, outside London. In her entertaining memoir, The Winds of Time (1934), Edith Gordon describes how, at the time of her marriage both she and her new husband were convinced he could look forward to a future as a successful novelist, ‘but when, after some months of strenuous effort in the literary and journalistic worlds, he had only succeeded in obtaining the editorship of Banjo World at three guineas a month, my confidence began to wane…’ Meanwhile, Lady Gordon began to write, albeit under a pseudonym, for various publications including Ladies’ Field, then edited by the notorious Lady Colin Campbell. When she published a collection of essays under her own name in 1908, this was ‘received with astonishment by certain of my friends and acquaintances. “How clever of you to be able to write,” they exclaimed in terms of surprise mingled with awe.’ Through her writing, Lady Gordon also came to know Edward Hudson, founder of Country Life, and often accompanied him on expeditions, thereby getting to visit many country houses and meeting the likes of Edwin Lutyens, Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson, with whom she shared an Irish background. All of these individuals would influence her when she came to commission a house for herself in County Kerry. What inspired her to embark on such an enterprise? Lady Gordon explained that by 1913, she had grown tired of life in London and its seemingly endless society crazes. ‘I felt I must get away from everybody and everything if I were not to become like the lady in the Divorce Court who, on being reprimanded by the judge for the frequency with which she committed adultery, flippantly remarked, “Well, what else can you do between tea and dinner”?’ And so, having inherited some money, she bought a parcel of land in County Kerry.





A rare example of an Arts and Crafts house in Ireland, Ard na Sidhe (meaning ‘Hill of the Fairies’) sits above Caragh Lake to the immediate west and ‘surrounded by mountains varying in colour from deepest purple to distant misty blue.’ Initially a wooden house was constructed on the site, but this proved problematic. In The Winds of Time, Lady Gordon claimed ‘I may as well remark that, having designed all the important parts of the house myself, such as the drawing room and the veranda, the bay-windows and my own bedroom, I had left such uninteresting details as the chimneys and stairs to the contractor.’ The latter individual she then blamed for such problems as the entrance hall being in the wrong place, claiming that when this was pointed out to him, ‘he drew himself up, and with an ingratiating smile, remarked that in view of the great success of the rest of the house I must forgive him. “It is really the nicest little house I ever built,’ he added with pride, “and the first in which I’ve been able to carry out all my own ideas”.’ In due course and inevitably, the wooden building had to be replaced with something more substantial, this one designed by the English-born Percy Richard Morley Horder, who in 1915 exhibited a drawing for the house at the Royal Academy in London. Although little remembered today, Horder enjoyed a successful career during his lifetime (he died in 1944). His early work tended to be in the Arts and Crafts style, while in the interwar period he became known for his Neo-Georgian work. He designed, or remodelled, a large number of country houses in England as well as churches (he was the son of a Congregationalist minister), university buildings in Cambridge and Oxford, as well as a large part of the Nottingham University’s campus. When young, Horder was good looking and could have charm, but he also had a ferocious temper, hence his nickname of ‘Holy Murder.’ His elder daughter thought that ‘he was the most remarkable man I have ever met, the most dedicated, the most charming (when he chose to be) and the most awful.’ Meanwhile, in an account of his life by Clyde Binfield published in 1988, it was recalled that Horder had a habit of treating his clients with disdain. ‘It was how most professionals might sometimes wish to treat their clients, if they dared. Horder’s way became legendary. He would shout at them, his voice sounding through the floor. “You come here and hector and bully me”, he shouted as one client retreated quietly from the room.’ Nevertheless, he seems to have enjoyed a good relationship with Lady Gordon who admitted that she had chosen him ‘out of a number of competitors, chiefly for his romantic appearance, which I felt somehow would be reflected in his designs and work. She also acknowledged not being the easiest of clients and given to regular changes of mind: ‘No architect, I am sure, ever had so much to contend with, and none ever emerged more amiably out of the ordeal, not even uttering a protest when submitting a drawing which, I saw one day, to my horror, was numbered “103”.’ Incidentally, the original wooden house was taken down and re-erected at the nearby town of Killorglin where it served as a Sinn Fein club until burnt out by the Black and Tans. 





Although reminiscent in design of an English manor house, Ard na Sidhe is built of local materials including sandstone from Glenbeigh, the only exception being Westmorland roof slates. Its exterior composed of a series of steep gables and mullioned windows, the building is surrounded by a sequence of gardens originally laid out by Lady Gordon, surrounded by low stone walls, all meandering down to the lake shoreline. Again, in her memoir, she lays claim for having been responsible for the gardens’ design, after an unnamed ‘lady gardener’, employed to help with laying out the site, revealed ‘that she knew even less about it than I did.’ Lady Gordon battled on alone but much enjoying the experience: ‘I must candidly say that I did not feel in the least that my garden was a “school of peace.” On the contrary, I should describe it as a perennial nightmare…on the other hand, my garden never bored me. It worried me by day, and kept me awake by night; it made me swear and it made me weep; and it would have taken very little more to make me scream.’ Unlike other houses in this part of the country, Ard na Sidhe survived both the War of Independence and the Civil War, although raided on at least seven occasions by troops belonging to various factions, and having items – including a motor car – stolen. But in the aftermath, separated (and eventually divorced) from her husband and with a diminished income, Lady Gordon found herself obliged to sell the property. ‘Parting with it,’ she wrote, ‘took an ever-increasing financial strain off my mind, but it left a hole in my heart which has never been filled…’ The house then passed through a number of hands before being acquired by the family of its present owners who in 1960 opened the place as a small hotel. More recently, Ard na Sidhe benefitted from a superlative restoration by architectural firm Howley Hayes Cooley, during which the original steel framed leaded casement windows were repaired and the stone exterior repointed in lime, while the interior underwent a replanning of the public areas and bedrooms. Many features which had been lost over intervening decades and, just as importantly, Ard na Sidhe’s original character, were brought back, along with panelled walls, stone chimneypieces, oak and stone flooring and oak doors. Today Ard na Sidhe looks and feels as though its original chatelaine still lived on the premises. 


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Two Days to Demolish the Work of Centuries


Rush is a coastal town lying some 15 miles north of central Dublin. Following the Anglo-Norman settlement in the late 12th century, much of the land in this area fell under the control of the Butler family, although the latter’s main base was further south in what are now Counties Kilkenny and Tipperary. As a result, during the medieval period the property was leased to a succession of tenants. In the mid-17th century, the estate was owned by James, the 12th Earl of Ormond and future first Duke of Ormond and according to the Civil Survey of 1654, the property was then occupied by one Robert Walsh. Estimated to extend to 300 acres, and valued at £120, the estate consisted of ‘one Mansion House of stone & one slated house of Office, a Barne & Stable slated, one thatcht Barne two other houses of office thatcht, six tenements, five cabbins part of an old castle Valued by ye Jury at five hundred poundes, a garden plott, one young orchard with some young trees set for ornament, a ruined Chappell of Ease, one horse mill now out of use & one decayed Pigeon House.’ Subsequently, a branch of the Hamilton family held the estate: within the walls of the ruined St. Catherine’s church is a tomb remembering ‘the affable, obliging, exemplary, wise, devout, most charitable, most virtuous and religious, the RT. Hon George Lord Hamilton, Baron of Strabane’ who died there in 1668. However, the Rush property was once more in the possession of the Butlers until 1715 when the second Duke of Ormond’s was attainded after he had fled to France and given his support to the Jacobite cause. The estate was then acquired by Henry Echlin whose great-grandfather Robert Echlin had moved from Scotland to Ireland where he was appointed Bishop of Down and Connor in 1612. A judge and ardent bibliophile, Henry Echlin was created a baronet in 1721 and on his death four years later, the title and estate in Rush passed to his grandson, Sir Robert Echlin. The latter’s wife Elizabeth (née Bellingham) continued the family’s engagement with books, being a writer and friend of Samuel Richardson (she is remembered for having penned an alternative, less shocking, end for Clarissa). Like George Hamilton before him, Sir Robert, who died in 1757, is buried in the now-ruined St Catherine’s church, his tomb reading
‘Here lies a man without pretence,
Blessed with plain reason and common sense,
Calmly he looked on either life and here
Saw nothing to regret or there to fear.
From nature’s temperate feast rose satisfied
Thanked Heaven that he lived, and that he died.’
Readers familiar with the works of Alexander Pope will recognised that the first two lines are a variant of those written by the poet for his On Mrs Corbet, who died of a Cancer in her Breast, while the other four come from Pope’s epitaph to Elijah Fenton. 






Sir Robert Echlin had no direct male heir and so the Rush estate and baronetcy passed to his nephew, Sir Henry Echlin who appears to have been something of a wastrel and who dissipated the greater part of his inheritance before dying suddenly in 1799. Long before then, gambling debts had cost him the Rush estate which in 1780 was bought by his cousin Elizabeth. A daughter of Sir Robert, she had been left a mere shilling by her father who disapproved of what he deemed Elizabeth’s unsuitable marriage to Francis Palmer of Castle Lacken, County Mayo (for more on the Palmers and Castle Lacken, see https://theirishaesthete.com/2022/09/12/castle-lacken). Thus the estate passed into the hands of the Palmers who chose to rename the place Kenure Park (from the Irish Ceann Iubhair, meaning the Headland of the Yew Trees), by which it has been known ever since. Francis and Elizabeth Palmer’s son, Roger, on his death in 1811 bequeathed ‘May Money’ to the area. According to the terms of his will, £2,500 was to be laid out in Ireland ‘in proper securities at 6% p.a. compound interest, and I desire that the interest be employed every succeeding year, in the month of May, for the purpose of giving a marriage gift to ten women. Never married, between the ages of twenty & thirty-two years, at the rate of £10 each.’  Furthermore, ‘They must be from the poorest & born upon any part of my estate in the County of Dublin, but women born in the environs of the town of Rush, within two miles of my estate be preferred.’ Seemingly this fund still exists, although now dormant. Meanwhile, successive generations of Palmers lived on the estate until the death without a direct male heir of Lt. General Sir Roger Palmer, fifth baronet, in 1910. Kenure Park then passed to Colonel Roderick Henry Fenwick-Palmer who retained the property until 1964 when, unable to maintain it any longer, he sold the place to the Irish Land Commission for £75,500. Most of the land was divided between local farmers, with the rest acquired by Dublin County Council for housing and playing fields.





A succession of houses were constructed on what eventually became known as the Kenure estate. The scant remains of what is thought to be a late-medieval tower house lie to the north of the later Palmer residence, and this may have been the ‘Mansion House of stone’ mentioned in the Civil Survey of 1654. In any case, that building was succeeded by another, constructed either during the time of the dukes of Ormond or else soon after the estate came into the hands of the Echlins. A description of this house survives, since it was visited in June 1783 by the antiquary Austin Cooper who noted that ‘About half a mile from the (Roman Catholic) Chapel is Rush House, once the seat of the Echlin family, and which now belongs to a Mr. Palmer. It is a large quadrangular building in the old style, terminated by a hewn parapet ornamented with urns. In the front is a small pediment supported by four Tuscan pillars, which evidently appears to be a modern addition. The situation of it is low, but the view of the sea agreeable. The improvements about it are very neat and kept in good order.’ This late 17th/early 18th century house appears to have remained intact until the outbreak of fire in 1827 but the damage cannot have been too serious since photographs show both the bow-ended drawing room and the room above it had elaborate rococo ceilings in the style of Robert West. In 1842-44 extensive work was carried out on the building to the designs of George Papworth, the exterior refaced in stucco in the manner of a Nash London terrace and a tremendous pedimented Corinthian portico of granite added to the facade. Inside, the entrance hall was given engaged Doric columns and walls covered in yellow scagliola. Beyond this rose a top-lit Imperial staircase with ornate wrought-iron scrolled balustrading, further Doric columns on the ground floor and Ionic pilasters above. All  survived until 1964 when the house was sold and a four-day auction held to dispose of the contents, which realised a total of some £250,000. Contemporary reports noted that a pair of Buhl cabinets went for just £120, while a Chinese Chippendale display cabinet, sold to a London dealer, made £6,800, seemingly the highest price yet paid for a single piece of furniture at auction in Ireland. Today these figures seem absurdly low. To give a couple of examples: in June 2008, that same Chinese Chippendale cabinet was sold at auction by Christie’s for more than £2.7 million. And in October 2006, two mid-18th century chairs attributed to the London cabinet makers William and Richard Gomm and once part of a set of five in Kenure Park, sold for US$408,000.  Meanwhile, an undignified fate awaited the house itself, which was left standing empty by the county council, subject to the inevitable decay and equally inevitable assault by vandals who eventually managed to set fire to the place. Finally, after 14 years of neglect, the authority sought tenders for Kenure Park’s demolition, although after local petitioning, Papworth’s great portico was left standing, a melancholic reminder of what had been lost. As a headline in the Irish Times noted in September 1978, it took ‘Two Days to Demolish the Work of Centuries…’

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A Prize for Bravery


August 2015

March 2018

April 2023

Regular readers of this site may remember that five years ago, the Irish Aesthete established an annual prize for owners of historic houses here, kindly sponsored by the O’Flynn Group and organised in conjunction with Historic Houses of Ireland (HHI). This year’s recipients of the prize are the owners of Dromdiah, County Cork, about which more can be read here: The Age of Austerity « The Irish Aesthete.
When first visited almost a decade ago, the house was a roofless shell, smothered with vegetation both inside and out, and widely regarded as beyond salvation. Not long afterwards it was bought and since then has undergone a painstaking restoration that now nears completion (the owners hope to move into the building later this year). The work at Dromdiah shows that no property is beyond salvation and once again demonstrates a new wave of interest in bringing Ireland’s historic houses back to life. As such it is a very worthy recipient of the 2025 HHI-O’Fynn Group Heritage Prize.







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A Handsome House



‘Not far from Douglas is a handsome house adorned with a cupola and good plantations, the residence of Mr Richard Newenham, merchant in Cork, a gentleman who is the largest dealer in Ireland in the worsted trade, and employs some thousands in different parts of this country in spinning bay yarn, which he exports to Bristol.’ From The Ancient and Present State of the County and City of Cork by Charles Smith (1750).
The Newenhams are believed to have settled in Cork in the early 17th century and to have prospered as merchants: in 1671 one of their number, John Newenham, served as Mayor of Cork city. One branch of the family would come to live at Coolmore (see Trans-Atlantic Links « The Irish Aesthete). Believed to have been born around 1705, Richard Newenham was the son of another John, a clothier who some years earlier had become a Quaker. His father-in-law, Thomas Wight, who also began professional life as a clothier, was author of A history of the rise and progress of the people called Quakers, in Ireland, from the year 1653 to 1700. The eldest of seven children, Richard Newenham prospered and, as noted by Charles Smith, developed a thriving textile business. As Daniel Beaumont has noted, he may also have been involved in the manufacture of sailcloth, because the village of Douglas, close to Maryborough, had become an important centre for this industry. Newenham also went into partnership with a number of other men in the business of ‘sugar making and sugar boiling’ on the southern outskirts of Cork city. In 1738 he married Sarah Devonsher, member of another successful Quaker family which was responsible for building Kilshannig (see Exuberance « The Irish Aesthete).





Probably built not long before Charles Smith published his book on Cork in 1750 and thought to be on the site of an earlier house, Maryborough was then described as having a cupola, but that no longer exists. The main body of the house is rendered, of three storeys over a raised basement, and seven bays wide, the three-bay breakfront defined with limestone quoins. A substantial flight of steps leads up to the pedimented entrance doorcase, also of limestone. The rear of the house is similar, having a three-bay breakfront but with a Gibbsian doorcase and the two upper floors being slate-fronted, as is the upper section of an extension to the east. The latter’s two-storied facade is a substantial, three-bay bow. This part of the building is thought to be a later extension from c.1830 while behind it is another addition from the late 18th century, a gable-ended wing accommodating a cantilevered Portland stone staircase: Frank Keohane proposes this as the work of local architect Michael Shanahan (who also worked in Ulster for the Earl-Bishop of Derry). The interiors of Maryborough are relatively plain, as befitted the home of a member of the Quaker community, amongst whom there was strong disapproval of gratuitous ornament. However, one room on the first floor has an elaborately decorated rococo ceiling, heavily enriched with scrolling acanthus leaves and an abundance of floral bouquets. 





Following Richard Newenham’s death in 1759, Maryborough was inherited by his only son John, and after the latter died in turn his son, another Richard, inherited the property. In 1837 it was described by Samuel Lewis as ‘the residence of E.E. Newenham Esq., a noble mansion in a spacious demesne, embellished with stately timber.’
Maryborough remained in the ownership of the Newenhams until the late 19th century, although rented out for some years before being sold to Thomas Sherrard in 1889. His descendants lived there until 1995 when the place was sold to the present owners who turned the house into an hotel, with a large bedroom extension added to the south and, more recently, an orangery/function room to the immediate west of the old building.


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In Need of an Overhaul



Born in Cheshire in 1689, Robert Taylor was a younger son of Sir Thomas Taylor, first baronet. The latter’s father, also called Thomas Taylor, had come to Ireland in 1652 to work as Chief Surveyor and Examiner on the Down Survey with an annual stipend of £100. In the aftermath of this enterprise, Taylor sold his own family lands in Sussex and bought 21,000 acres in County Meath. His descendants, who eventually became Marquesses of Headfort, continued to live there until the last century, their main residence Headfort now serving as a preparatory school (see A Unique Legacy « The Irish Aesthete). Meanwhile, as a younger son Robert Taylor could not expect to inherit the family property and so studied for Holy Orders at Trinity College Dublin. In 1714, he was appointed Archdeacon of Kilmacduagh in the Province of Tuam, likely through the influence of his brother-in-law William Fitzgerald, Bishop of Clonfert and Kilmacduagh. Eight years later, Taylor became Precentor of Clonfert, and then in 1726 made Dean of the same diocese, although he seems to have resigned from the position soon afterwards. Some years earlier, he had bought a parcel of land between Skerries and Balbriggan in North County Dublin. When his only sister died in 1726, she left him 544 acres in County Galway and £800. More than a decade later, Taylor used this bequest to purchase the townlands of Ardgilland and Baltry, adjacent to the property he had already acquired north of the capital. Here he built a modest country residence for himself of three bays and two storeys-over-basement. Although the area had originally been called Ardgillan (from the Irish Ard Choill, meaning High Wood), its location on raised ground overlooking the Irish Sea meant that it had come to be known as Mount Prospect. For this reason, the new property was given the name Prospect House. In what later became a billiard room can be seen a white marble plaque carrying an engraving in Latin which can be translated as follows:
‘With the Lord’s Favour, Robert Taylor, Dean of Clonfert, built this house in the year of Salvation 1738.
May mendacity, quarreling, shouting, grief and anger be far from here.
Let sweet friendship, calm, soulful happiness, naked truth, and play be present.
So we say in the morning and again when the sun sinks beneath the ocean.’
(This last line taken from Horace’s Odes, Book 4, Verse 5)





The Reverend Robert Taylor died unmarried in 1744 and the Prospect estate was inherited by his elder brother, another Sir Thomas Taylor. In due course the property passed to the latter’s heir, Sir Thomas Taylour (note the change in the spelling of the family’s surname), who in 1766 was created first Earl of Bective. In 1783, Prospect was described by the English antiquary Austin Cooper as ‘a country seat of Lord Bective’s.’ A few years later, in 1786, plans were drawn up by one Henry Brownrigg for alterations to Prospect House. While remaining two storeys’ high, Brownrigg’s proposals would effectively have doubled the building’s size, with the addition of a new drawing room, dining room, a parlour, a ‘court’ and a ‘great stairs.’ However, the scheme remained unexecuted and following the earl’s death in 1795, Prospect, along with the rest of the Taylour estates, was inherited by his eldest son, yet another Thomas Taylour who would be created first Marquess of Headfort five years later. Before then, he leased Prospect to one of his younger brothers, Clotworthy Taylour, the latter’s first name deriving from his mother’s family. That union was made even closer when he married a cousin, Frances Rowley, only child of the Hon. Major Clotworthy Rowley and heiress to the Summerhill estate in County Meath (see My Name is Ozymandias « The Irish Aesthete), which in turn led him to change his own name to Clotworthy Rowley. In 1800, he became first Baron Langford of Summerhill. Incidentally, one of Clotworthy Rowley’s siblings was General Hon. Robert Taylour who, in his retirement lived at Dowdstown, County Meath (see Dowdstown « The Irish Aesthete). Meanwhile, Prospect House became available to the youngest son of that generation, the Hon Henry Edward Taylor who, like his great-uncle Robert, was a Church of Ireland clergyman. However, unlike the late Dean of Clonfert, the Rev Edward Taylour was married, his wife being Marianne Harriet St Leger, a granddaughter of the first Viscount Doneraile. The couple came to live at Prospect in 1807 and the following decade saw substantial changes made to the structure building. 





A map dating from 1844 shows Prospect now renamed Ardgillan Castle, the house having been given castellations and single-storey, three-bay battlemented wings on either side of the entrance front. These accommodated a new drawing and dining room.  The same year also saw the opening of a railway line from Dublin to Drogheda which passed through the eastern boundary of the estate: the Taylors gave permission for this on several conditions, one of which was that trains would stop for them on their property if they so wished. Following the death of the Rev Edward Taylorin 1852 and then his wife Marianne seven years later , Ardgillen was initially inherited by the couple’s younger surviving son General Sir Richard Chambre Hayes Taylor, his elder brother Captain Thomas Edward Taylor having inherited the Dowdstown estate from their unmarried uncle, General Hon. Robert Taylor. However, the siblings agreed to swap properties, meaning Thomas Edward Taylor lived at Ardgillen.  A Conservative MP for County Dublin from 1841 to 1883, he became Chief Government Whip in 1866 and later Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and a member of the Queen’s Privy Council. To designs by architect Sandham Symes, further alterations were made to the house in 1863 with the addition of two castellated towers, one containing a smoking room, the other storage rooms. Thomas Edward Taylor had married the previous year, and he and his wife Louisa Tollemache would go on to have five children. The eldest of these, Captain Edward Richard Taylor, inherited Ardgillan following his father’s death in 1883 and left his own mark on the house by installing oak panelling in the dining room (the doors carved with the date 1889) and shelving in the library. He only married in 1935, shortly before his 70th birthday, and left no immediate heir when he died three years later. The Ardgillan estate, much reduced following sales of land over the preceding decades, was now inherited by his nephew Richard Taylor, a barrister who had hitherto been living and working in Singapore with his family. The Taylors returned to Europe and lived in Ardgillan but found it increasingly difficult to make the place pay for itself. In 1958, they sold a large Kilkenny marble chimneypiece from the house to the Hon Desmond Guinness: today it can be seen in the entrance hall of Leixlip Castle. Four years later, the entire estate was sold to a German industrialist, Heinrich Pott, and members of his family held onto the place until 1981 when it was placed on the market, the eventual purchaser being the local authority, now Fingal County Council. Ardgillan Castle and its demesne are open to the public, with plenty of walking trails around the grounds and much attention paid to maintenance of the formal and walled gardens. As for the house itself, while work was undertaken on conserving the fabric some 40 years ago, today the place looks tired and its meanly furnished interiors in need of some attention. The same authority is also responsible for two other historic properties – Malahide Castle and Newbridge both of which have benefitted in recent years from generous care and improvement. It’s time for Ardgillan Castle to enjoy the same treatment and be given an overhaul.


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Unspoilt



Sitting in a graveyard on the edge of Strangford Lough, his little Roman Catholic church at Ardkeen on the Ards Peninsula, County Down dates from 1777, as legislation against dissenters from the Established Church was beginning to be revoked. It was erected by general subscription overseen by a local priest, Fr Daniel O’Dorman and initially served the entire peninsula but in the 19th century, as other churches were constructed, the building became less used and was reduced to the status of a mortuary chapel: seemingly it now hosts a service only once a year, on All Souls’ Day (November 1st). The church retains much of its original appearance, including arch-headed sash windows and a roof covered in rough-hewn ‘Tullycavey’ slates. Inside also little has changed, with the box pews still in place and on the south side of the altar a simple confessional box. In 2019 the church won one of the Ulster Architectural Heritage’s Angel Awards for Best Maintenance of a Community Building, but it now looks once more in need of  attention, as the condition of the window frames indicates.



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A Remarkable Building



Lecturing at the recently established Royal College of Science in Dublin in 1868, John Ruskin declared that one of the chief reasons for his accepting an invitation to do so was that it allowed him ‘to stand near the beautiful building…which was the first realization I had the joy to see of the principles I had, until then, been endeavouring to teach.’ The edifice to which Ruskin referred is Trinity College Dublin’s Museum Building, now a venerable 170 years old but judged a radical instance of new design when first constructed. Writing in The Irish Builder in May 1866, Sir Thomas Drew declared it to be ‘a great work, most important in its influence on the arts in this country . . . To this remarkable building and to this alone we trace the inauguration of the great revolution in public taste which has since taken place.’ Even while still a work in progress, the Museum Building was exciting comment, William Allingham writing in May 1855, to William Michael Rossetti (brother of Dante Gabriel), ‘Yesterday in Dublin I saw but hastily the part-finished building in Trinity College, which is after Ruskin’s heart. Style early Venetian, I suppose, with numberless capitals delicately carved over with holly-leaves, shamrocks, various flowers, birds and so on. There are also circular frames here and there in the wall, at present empty, to be filled no doubt with eyes of coloured stone. Ruskin has written to the architect, a young man, expressing his high approval of the plans; so by-and-by all you cognoscenti will be rushing over to examine the Stones of Dublin.’ The origins of the building went back a couple of decades before its construction. In 1833 the college’s board launched a competition for the design of a museum to house  the geological and other collections which until then had been kept in a room in Regent House, the large block through which most visitors enter the campus. A number of architects submitted proposals, while others – not least Decimus Burton – declined invitations to do so. Eventually, in April 1853, a scheme from the firm of Deane, Woodward and Deane was accepted (although John McCurdy, who was the official college architect, insisted on taking credit for the original floor plans).  




The firm of Deane, Woodward and Deane – or more correctly ‘Sir Thomas Deane Knt., Son and Woodward’ – was founded in Cork in 1851 when the aforementioned Sir Thomas Deane took his son Thomas Newenham Deane and the Dublin-based architect Benjamin Woodward into partnership. Two years later the firm won the job of designing Trinity College’s Museum Building and in consequence it opened an office in the capital which thereafter became more important than that in Cork. Further commissions soon followed, not least for the Oxford Museum which, like that in Trinity College Dublin, is indebted to the Venetian Gothic style championed by John Ruskin. In the case of Trinity College, the exterior of the building is relatively plain, faced in blocks of Wicklow granite and broken by sequences of arched windows, those looking over College Park centred on sets of four, one above the over, the upper group also being given a balcony. The pilasters, capitals, voussoirs and soffits are all of Portland Stone, as are the sequence of roundels filled with coloured marbles. In every case, these features benefit from elaborate and individual design (notice, for example, how no two pilaster capitals are the same), exquisite carving work executed by a ‘Mr Roe’ of Lambeth and Cork-born brothers John and James O’Shea, also known for their playful capitals on the facade of the  former Kildare Street Club visible on the other side of College Park. Flanked by arched windows and beneath another balcony, the main entrance to the building has a tympanum of Caen Stone bearing the college crest.  Costing £12,768, three shillings and seven pence, the exterior dressings of the Museum Building were responsible for almost half its eventual figure of £27,980, six shillings and eight pence. 




Since being constructed, parts of the Museum Building’s interior have undergone modification, with many of the larger rooms being subdivided. What remains unchanged is the great, double-height stair hall, approached via a vestibule, the latter containing among other things the skeleton of an Irish Elk. The walls, originally intended to be of rubble masonry covered in plaster, are lined in Caen stone, selected by the architects as being more appropriate to the space. The Imperial staircase of Portland Stone leads to facing first-floor, triple-arched galleries supported by similar arcaded screens on the floor below. The columns are of different coloured polished stone, all of it Irish except for a dark-red serpentinite from Cornwall. There are 14 full columns which cost £13 each, 18  half-columns (£8 each) and 98 feet of Connemara marble used for the stair and balcony handrails (£122, 10 shillings). This great space is lit by glazed oculi set within a pair of shallow domes decorated with polychromatic brick, their central supporting arch carried on stone colonettes. Particularly in consequence of these domes, the impression is given of a harmonious marriage between the Venetian Gothic and Hispanic Moorish styles. Above the vestibule arches, for example, can be seen a series of small six-sided star openings; these are part of the architects’ original ventilation system reminiscent of those found in old hammams. Trinity College’s Museum Building has rightly been admired since first built (and, as mentioned above, even before its completion). The place is still much in use as part of a working university, which explains the somewhat distracting clutter. But that staircase and those soaring domes…


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Uncertain Future I


Just over a week ago, the handful of Cistercian monks still living at Mount Melleray Abbey, County Waterford left the premises and moved to another part of the country. The history of the abbey dates back almost 200 years, to the aftermath of the 1830 Revolution in France when a group of some 64 Irish and English monks were obliged to leave their monastery at Melleray in Brittany. Led by Melleray’s Prior, Waterford-born Fr Vincent Ryan, they arrived in this country in December 1831 and initially rented a property in County Kerry but soon found that site unsatisfactory and were then offered an alternative by Sir Richard Keane who a few years earlier had inherited a large estate at Cappoquin, County Waterford. Keane proposed the monks rent 600 acres of mountain land at a modest rent. Assisted by local people, the furze and scrub covering the property was gradually cleared and a working farm established. Meanwhile, preparations were made for the establishment of a new monastery, the foundation stone of which was laid on 20th August 1833, the feast of St Bernard of Clairvaux. Created an abbey two years later, with Fr Ryan as its first abbot, the monastery was named Mount Melleray, in memory of the French house left behind. 





For a long time, Mount Melleray thrived; at its height the monastery was home to some 150 priests and brothers. A school operated on the premises from 1843 until it closed in 1974 (see Untapped Potential « The Irish Aesthete) and in addition to the farm, there was a carpenters’ workshop, a forge and an aviary. Nothing offers better evidence of the Cistercian order’s confidence in the future than the great church, plans for which were first drawn up a century ago following the acquisition of all the cut limestone which had once been used for the exterior of Mitchelstown Castle, County Cork. That great house, which stood some 28 miles to the west west, had been burnt by anti-Treaty forces in August 1922 (see Doomed Inheritance « The Irish Aesthete) and stood empty when Mount Melleray’s Abbot Dom Marius O’Phelan proposed buying the stone. Once agreement had been reached, the material was transported by steam lorry in two consignments a day over a five-year period. Designed by the Dublin firm of Jones and Kelly which specialised in producing traditional designs for religious clients, the new abbey church’s foundation stone was laid in April 1933, shortly before the abbey celebrated the centenary of its foundation. With its great square lantern tower, the main body of work on the abbey church was completed in November 1940, although it was only somewhat later that the high altar and some 20 lesser altars, gifts of benefactors, were installed, together with stained glass, some of which was made by the Harry Clarke Studios. At the south-west corner of this building and at a right-angle to it, a smaller, ‘public’ church was also built, again to the designs of Jones and Kelly and again with stained glass from the Clarke studios. The interior here is also decorated with extensive use of mosaic on the walls. The church was originally dedicated to Saint Philomena, and was once the National Shrine of the latter saint. However, her statue was removed when, on instructions from the Holy See in 1961, Philomena’s name was removed from all liturgical calendars. 





So what will happen now to these churches and all the ancillary buildings around them, once accommodating hundreds of monks and visitors but now standing empty? The last eight monks have moved to another monastery, Mount St Joseph, County Tipperary and no decision has been taken on the future of the abbey at Mount Melleray. In Ireland of the 21st century, this is not an unusual circumstance: the numbers of people choosing to enter the religious life has dropped steeply in recent decades, and one legacy are substantial properties that are surplus to their original requirement. Finding an alternative purpose, especially for a site such as this one, which is relatively isolated, several miles from the nearest town and with no public services in the vicinity, will be challenging. And yet, again like so many others, the buildings are sturdily constructed and, in this particular instance, of architectural interest not least for the incorporation of cut stone from Mitchelstown Castle. A conundrum. 


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Ill-Advised Indifference


While last Monday’s page told a cheering story of restoration and renewal, today’s story demonstrates that plenty of work remains to be done in order to secure the future of our urban architectural heritage. Waterford city has some fine Georgian buildings, a number of which have been restored in recent years. However, many others have been left to languish, such as that above, no.18 Lady’s Lane. This street was once an important thoroughfare, lined with fine houses of which no.18 is a particularly good example. Thought to date from c.1750, it is of five bays and three storeys, with a particularly splendid staircase and rococo plasterwork. An ugly extension was added to the rear in 1975  when the house served as a men’s hostel (doing so until 2012). Otherwise, despite a fire thought to have been started by vandals, the building retains much of its original character and appearance, although it hasnow  sat empty for many years. Likewise no.22 Lady’s Lane, which is of a later date (c.1800), but likewise of five bays and three storeys, and again suffering neglect. Aside from being a terrible waste of good housing stock, the impression conveyed by such dereliction in the city – where, incidentally, the local authority has hitherto spent over €24 million on consultants’ fees alone for a north quay scheme that has yet to get underway – is that the future Waterford’s historic centre remains under threat from ill-advised indifference.   

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