A survey conducted in Northern Ireland in 2005 concluded that while there had been 40,000 thatched dwellings in the six counties half a century earlier, only 150 of these now remained. Joseph Gallagher and Greg Stevenson, authors of Traditional Cottages of County Donegal, believe the situation is no better, and very possibly worse, in that county despite it being ‘home to one of the largest surviving concentrations of such vernacular cottages in Ireland.’ They also note that ‘One of the most enduring images of Ireland and Irishness is that of the traditional rural cottage.’ In 1935 the Swedish ethnologist Dr Åke Campbell who had arried out a survey of rural housing in this country, wrote ‘the Irish peasant house never stands out in bold relief against its background but melts into it even as a tree or a rock. Built of stone, clay, sods, grass and straw brought from the vicinity, the house harmonises with the landscape to which it belongs.’ One might add that being made of natural, local materials when these dwellings are forsaken, they dissolve back into the soil from whence they came. Would that the same could be said of the bungalow which is the most common form of housing type found in rural Ireland today.
One must avoid succumbing to excessive sentimentality: despite what we perceive as its inherent charm the traditional cottage tended to be small, dark, with poor insulation and extremely limited facilities. It is understandable that anyone inhabiting such a place would wish to replace it with a more comfortable residence. Still, it remains a matter of shame and disappointment that so little has been done to ensure the conservation of our historic dwellings since their loss means part of the nation’s collective history also disappears; tellingly many of the best examples featured by Gallagher and Stevenson have been preserved in open air museums and folk parks, or else converted into holiday homes. But very many more have fallen into dereliction and this book is as much a lament as a celebration of Donegal’s traditional cottages. The book is splendidly produced and illustrated, and with a text both informative and engaging. It also serves as an invaluable record of what still survives, but may not do so for much longer…
Traditional Cottages of County Donegal is published by Under the Thatch Ltd. For further information, see: http://www.underthethatch.co.uk/book

Many visitors arriving at Dublin airport are likely to take a route into the city centre that leads them along Amiens Street. This takes its name from Viscount Amiens, an honorary title of the Earls of Aldborough, the second of whom, Edward Augustus Stratford, built the last great free-standing town house of the 18th century around the corner on Portland Row. Travelling along this route visitors will notice the present dreadful condition of that building.
The earl’s long-lost country seat Belan, County Kildare has already been discussed here (Splendours and Follies, September 30th 2013) and now it looks as though Aldborough House could likewise be consigned to oblivion as a result of ongoing failure by state and civic authorities to intervene in its preservation.
Today marooned amidst neglect and decay (the organisation Irish Business against Litter last week declared this part of Dublin the dirtiest urban area in the State) Aldborough House is an extraordinary building, after Leinster House the biggest Georgian private residence in the capital and a testament to one man’s regrettably misplaced ambition. The earl, who already had a perfectly fine property next to Belvedere House on Great Denmark Street, was determined to construct a new one that would serve as testament to his wealth and social position, and also serve as centre-piece to a westerly extension of the city beyond that already achieved by the Gardiners. Portland Row is a continuation of the North Circular Road, running from the Phoenix Park to the docks, and it made sense to plan for development in this part of Dublin. Unfortunately Lord Aldborough failed to take into account the consequences of the 1800 Act of Union (for which he voted) which led to a precipitate decline in the city’s fortunes and left his great town house stranded.

We know a great deal about the construction of Aldborough House, thanks to research on the subject conducted by Aidan O’Boyle and carried in Volume IV of the Irish Georgian Society’s annual journal Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies. This text, like all others on the subject, is indebted to O’Boyle’s admirable work. It is clear from his analysis of extant material that the building of Aldborough House was fraught from the beginning, not least because the earl’s aspirations were greater than his budget. Although pailings were erected and foundations dug around the start of July 1793, there were many stops and starts as unpaid workmen left the site and replacements had to be found. O’Boyle quotes several piteous letters from various architects, plasterers, painters and other skilled craftsmen who became enmeshed in the project and then found they had to plead for monies owed. It did not help that Lord Aldborough during this period was in the throes of sundry legal battles, one of which led to his temporary imprisonment.
Yet somehow the work went on and the house rose ever higher. In style, Aldborough House was something of an anachronism, a last gasp of Palladianism with its tall central block flanked by quadrants that led to pavilions, one containing a chapel the other a private theatre, thereby satisfying the earl’s spiritual and cultural needs. At least in its early stages the architect responsible appears to have been Richard Johnston, older brother of the better-known (and better) Francis Johnson. After his departure several other hands were involved but most likely it was Lord Aldborough himself who had the greatest input into the plans: a extant drawing from his hand of the theatre wing confirms just how decisive was his influence on the project.

Facing north, the main block of Aldborough House is tall and narrow, three storeys over sunken basement and seven bays wide with the three centre bays advanced and pedimented, the whole clad in granite. The pediment contains an elaborately carved Stratford coat of arms in coade stone while the rusticated ground floor features a Doric portico bearing the motto Otium cum Dignitate (Leisure with Dignity). The most striking feature is the line of exaggeratedly elongated windows on the piano nobile; these emphasise the building’s height and thereby distort is overall proportions. An eaves parapet, since removed, was surmounted by alternating eagles and urns on all four sides. A plinth in the centre of the forecourt carried a copy of the Apollo Belvedere.
The side and rear elevations are all faced in a now-mellowed brick, originally rendered to resemble ashlar and with large central bows on the east and south sides. At some point the chapel wing to the west was demolished but that originally containing the easterly theatre survives, terminating in a bow facing the street; its interior is gone. The exterior of the two wings both had blind round-headed arches with sunken panels below and lion and sphinx figures along the parapets.
The interior of the main house begins with an entrance hall which in turn leads to an immense top-lit stair hall, with wrought-iron balusters set into the cantilevered Portland stone steps, the effect likened by the late Maurice Craig to that of ‘a well-shaft, mine or one of Mr Howard’s penitentiaries.’ On the ground floor a sequence of rooms lead off on all sides, library, dining room, small dining room and so forth, with a circular music room to the rear from which a double-perron staircase led to the garden. Some, but not much of these rooms’ decoration survived until recently such as friezes above the Adamesque doorways; after the horrendous neglect of recent years does any of this still remain? It is believed that Pietro Bossi, who tendered for the stuccowork in the house, provided the main chimneypieces but these were removed at the end of the 19th century. The first floor featured another sequence of rooms still loftier than those below and primarily intended for entertaining as they included a ballroom above the library on the east side of the building. A much quoted description by the newly-arrived vicereine Lady Hardwicke in 1801 gives an account of the staircase’s astonishing sequence of paintings which mostly seem to have been given over to apotheosising the earl and his wife. Again, these have all long vanished.

Costing over £40,000 Aldborough House was largely completed by 1798 but its owner did not enjoy the comfort of his new residence for long since he died in January 1801. Without a direct heir and in dispute with his brothers, he left the property to his widow who subsequently remarried but was likewise dead eighteen months after her first husband. There followed more than a decade of litigation before Lord Aldborough’s nephew Colonel John Wingfield was confirmed in possession of the house; he promptly sold its entire contents. The building was then let to the splendidly named Professor Gregor von Feinaigle, a former Cistercian monk and mnemonist, who opened a school there. Six years later von Feinaigle died and by 1843 the house had become an army barracks. In 1850 the garden statuary was all sold and in the 1940s the garden itself was lost, used by Dublin Corporation for social housing so that today Aldborough House has effectively no grounds.
As for the house itself, coming into public ownership it served as a depot for the Department of Posts and Telegraphs during the last century. During this time and especially in later decades the property was compromised by various ill-considered alterations such as the vertical divisions of rooms to create office space and the effective gutting of the former theatre. Nevertheless, the house remained in use and in reasonable condition. In 1999 the state telecommunications company Telecom Eireann was privatised as Eircom and that organisation offered Aldborough House for sale. The Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) considered it for a new headquarters but then opted not to go ahead with the scheme and in 2005 the building was sold for €4.5 million to a company called Aldborough Developments, part of a network of businesses connected with would-be tycoon Philip Marley whose Ely Property Group has been much in the news of late, none of it for particularly positive reasons. Thereafter matters of ownership grow increasingly complex with only one irrefutable fact: for the past nine years this important part of the national built heritage has been allowed to fall ever further into a decline which, as the photographs above (taken in 2010) and below (taken last week) demonstrate, now risks becoming irreversible.

Last May, RTE television carried a report warning that Aldborough House was now Dublin’s most endangered historic building; this information was provided by An Taisce which for several years has been at the forefront of efforts to ensure the property is saved. In 2006 Aldborough Developments secured approval from the city council for the conversion of the house into a forty-bedroom ‘Day Hospital Medical Care Facility.’ The scheme never went ahead, the property crash occurred and Aldborough House started slithering into decay. Some years ago the council served enforcement proceedings against the owners to carry out repairs to the roof; this did not take place and inevitably the lead was all stolen from the valleys and parapet gulleys leading to terrible water damage. In December 2011 the council, having received a grant from central government of €80,000 and provided an additional €20,000 carried out emergency repairs to the roof. According to the city architect’s office, this work went ‘some way towards weatherproofing this vulnerable building until such time as the building’s owners are in a position to implement further urgent and necessary repairs in line with their statutory obligations.’
Those obligations have yet to be met: last spring, following an arson attack that could have been fatal but was caught in time, further enforcement proceedings were served on the owners to have the house’s windows, doors and other openings secured to prevent access. The city council’s Planning and Development Department’s Executive Manager Jim Keoghan commented at the time, ‘We would be concerned that there would be long-time damage done to the property in question’ as though this was a future possibility rather than something which had already occurred.
The RTE report explained that 75% of Aldborough Developments is owned by a company which is in liquidation, and this in turn is wholly owned by another company that the Bank of Ireland has placed in receivership. Astonishingly, the house remains outside the receivership process, allowing both the receiver and the bank to disclaim all responsibility for its upkeep, even though the latter has a charge on Aldborough House. No doubt legally this is the case, but where is the Bank of Ireland’s sense of corporate responsibility? Where its concern for the welfare of this country? Where its engagement with the society in which it operates? Likewise why is it that Dublin City Council, which could issue a Compulsory Purchase Order, has failed to do so? And why is it that the state, which has a department devoted to heritage, has ignored the shameful deterioration of an important historic building? Are those responsible in all three bodies suffering from collective blindness that they do not see what is happening to a property under their watch, and for the fate of which they will be held culpable? Or are they simply indifferent to what is taking place?
Last September when a farmer lost his High Court challenge over the compulsory purchase of his land, the presiding judge Justice John Hedigan declared that ‘the national interest must outweigh the interests of the individual.’ It is in the national interest that Aldborough House be saved and that all those who can act should do so now. Dear visitors: welcome to Ireland where we talk a lot of guff about history and heritage but – as you cannot fail to observe on your drive into central Dublin – where we have no qualms about allowing the remains of our past fall into dereliction.

Aside from Aidan O’Boyle’s essay in Volume IV of the Irish Georgian Society’s Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, you can see more images of Aldborough House, and its present sorry state, on the archiseek forum: http://www.archiseek.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=7878&sid=7637199907bad5a71623348e7c96d9a0&start=25
For the news report that appeared on RTE television in May 2013 see: http://www.rte.ie/news/player/2013/0509/3530477-dublin-georgian-house-is-capitals-most-endangered-historic-building/

Given the notoriety of its late 18th century resident, the fate of Mount Shannon, County Limerick seems inevitable. One of the country’s more striking ruins, the house formerly stood at the centre of a 900-acre demesne famous for its trees and gardens: in his 1822 Encyclopedia of Gardening the Scottish botanist and landscape designer John Claudius Loudon specifically cited Mount Shannon as an example of improvements in Ireland, and proposed these had been carried out under the direction of the first Earl of Clare, of whom more anon. Five years later Fitzgerald and McGregor in their study of the history and topography of Limerick city and county likewise refer to Mount Shannon: ‘the plantations are laid out with fine taste, and the gardens are extensive and well arranged.’ Aside from a handful of surviving specimen trees, no evidence of the demesne’s former glories now remains, and much of the land is given over to suburban housing, making it difficult to discern what the grounds must have looked like even a century ago. On the other hand it is still possible to gain a sense of the main house’s former appearance. In 1827 Fitzgerald and McGregor described it as being ‘one of the most superb mansions in the South of Ireland’ and although a hollow shell for over ninety years it clings onto a residue of grandeur.

The original Mount Shannon was built c.1750 by the euphoniously-named Silver Oliver whose family’s main estate was elsewhere in the county at Clonodfoy, later Castle Oliver. Oliver appears to have sold the property to a member of the White family but around 1765 it came into the possession of John Fitzgibbon, supposedly a descendant of the mediaeval White Knights, who had been raised a Roman Catholic but converted to Anglicanism so that he could become a lawyer (Penal Laws then barring this profession to everyone not a member of the established church). Highly successful, he amassed a considerable fortune
which when he died in 1780 was passed on to his son, also called John and later first Earl of Clare.
It would appear from various references that Lord Clare did much to improve and aggrandise Mount Shannon, not just its demesne but also the house. However the latter’s most striking feature was added by his eldest son the second earl in 1813. The immense Ionic portico with Doric pilasters behind was designed by Lewis Wyatt (a member of the prolific English family of architects and a nephew of James Wyatt), and occupies the three centre bays of the seven-bay north entrance front. Behind three round-headed doors gave access to the hall with the drawing room and other main reception rooms behind. The interiors, as a handful of 19th century photographs show, were chillingly neo-classical with scarcely any ornament. The same was true of the exterior which, as can be seen is constructed of brick with cut limestone dressings. The severity of the south, garden facade was relieved by a very large curved conservatory. To the immediate east of the two-storey over sunken basement house is a long, lower extension which would have been used for services and was originally concealed by a curved screen wall that joined the still-extant wall of the old walled garden.

Many stories are told of John ‘Black Jack’ Fitzgibbon, first Earl of Clare, some of them apocryphal, few of them kind. After studying at Trinity College, Dublin and Christchurch, Oxford he became a lawyer like his father before him. He was first elected to the Irish House of Commons in 1778 and five years later was appointed Attorney General. Appointed Lord Chancellor for Ireland in 1789, he was also received his first peerage, as Baron FitzGibbon, of Lower Connello; he was subsequently advanced to a Viscountcy in 1793 and finally received his earldom in 1795. Four years later he was granted an English peerage (entitling him to a seat in the House of Lords at Westminster), becoming Baron FitzGibbon, of Sidbury in the County of Devon.
Unquestionably brilliant, Fitzgibbon was also without doubt bigoted. It has often been noted that he was a hardline Protestant and a member of the Protestant Ascendancy who avidly promoted whatever measures he believed would best preserve that group’s political domination in Ireland. He supported harsh measures against members of the 1798 Rebellion and was openly hostile to Roman Catholicism despite or perhaps because of his father had originally been a member of this faith. When it came to the Act of Union in 1800, of which he was firmly in favour, there was widespread understanding that this would be accompanied by concessions made to Roman Catholics with the Penal Laws being ameliorated. FitzGibbon persuaded George III that any such liberalisation of the status quo would be a violation of the king’s Coronation Oath and thus ensured pro-Emancipation measures were not included in the Union legislation. In so doing he delayed Catholic Emancipation by three decades and encouraged the spread of sectarianism.
It is said that FitzGibbon once declared he would make the Irish as ‘tame as a dead cat.’ As a result, there are stories of dead cats being thrown into his coach, and of more of the same being flung into his grave when he died in January 1802 following a fall from his horse at Mount Shannon the previous month.

At the time of the Act of Union, Lord Clare arranged for a handsome pension by way of compensation for the loss of his office as Lord Chancellor which was then abolished; this was to be paid both to him and his immediate heir. Thus the second earl, who died in 1851, enjoyed a handsome income not just from his estates which ran to more than 13,000 acres in Counties Limerick and Tipperary but from the munificence of the British Treasury. A close friend of Lord Byron, with whom he was at school, the second earl later became Governor first of Bombay and later of Bengal; he enhanced Mount Shannon by both the addition of the portico and other improvements, but by adding treasures from India and paintings acquired on his travels around Europe.
Since he had no children, his property passed to a younger brother, who duly became third earl. He was to suffer a number of disadvantages, among them the absence of the pension enjoyed by his predecessors, a much depleted income in the aftermath of the Great Famine, and the death of his only son during the Charge of the Light Brigage at the Battle of Balaclava in October 1854: Limerick’s Wellesley Bridge used to feature a handsome statue to the youthful Viscount FitzGibbon until it was blown up by the IRA in 1930.
On the death of the third earl in 1864 the title became extinct. His estate was left to the two younger of his three daughters (the eldest, who had caused a scandal by abandoning her own spouse and children to run off with the elderly husband of a half-sister, appears to have been disinherited). While the middle sister took possession of the FitzGibbon silver and, it seems, the greater part of the liquidity attached to the estate, the youngest Lady Louisa FitzGibbon assumed responsibility for Mount Shannon.

Lady Louisa was as dogged by bad luck as her father. Her eldest son died at the age of twenty, followed by her first husband and then the Italian Marchese she married in expectation of his money turned out to be as penniless as herself. With the advent of the Land Wars rents ceased to be paid, portions of the estate had to be sold, what remained was mortgaged, and money borrowed at high interest rates. All to no avail: Lady Louisa’s creditors demanded satisfaction, following litigation a receiver was appointed, and in the course of a sale lasting several days during June 1888 Mount Shannon was stripped of its contents including a very valuable library. Here is a small quote from the fascinating catalogue compiled by Limerick auctioneer John Bernal: ‘The Family Paintings are Chef Douvres [sic], by the first artist of the period, when they were taken, some of the Paintings, see page 42, were placed in the house about 1790, and will afford the connoisseur and speculator a good chance of getting a valuable Old Master on good terms. There are also some replicas from the Dresden gallery.’ The first such melancholy event of its kind in Ireland, a prelude to many more to follow over the coming decades, the Mount Shannon excited huge interest, with special trains and catering arrangements being laid on. Lady Louisa FitzGibbon spent the remainder of her days in a Dominican convent on the Isle of Wight, an establishment founded by the Roman Catholic convert wife of her uncle, the second Lord Clare; this was something of an irony given the first earl’s virulent hatred of all Catholics.
Five years after the sale, Thomas Nevins, who had been born in Mayo but made a fortune in the United States as a tram and railway contractor, bought Mount Shannon where he died in 1902, just like the first earl following a bad fall from a horse. His widow only survived until 1907 after which the place passed through various hands before what remained of the estate was bought in 1915 by David O’Hannigan of County Cork for £1,000. He did not have long to enjoy Mount Shannon since it was burned down in June 1920 during the War of Independence, the light of the flames apparently seen in Limerick city.
The house remains a shell. To walk through it today is to have a sense what it must have been like visiting a site such as the Baths of Caracalla in the aftermath of Imperial Rome’s collapse, especially as this immense structure is now surrounded by others domestic buildings of infinitely smaller dimensions and aspirations. Even in its present broken-down state Mount Shannon continues dominate the area and to exude an air of greater distinction than any of its neighbours.

A couple of weeks ago, the Irish Times‘ Patrick Freyne wrote a piece describing twenty-four hours on O’Connell Street, Dublin. Freyne was primarily concerned with reporting the people he encountered over this period and the activities, not least widespread drug dealing, that he witnessed on what is regularly touted as the Irish capital’s principal thoroughfare. He did not discuss the street’s present appearance nor the possibility that this might have consequences for the way in which it is treated (and often mistreated). So herewith a brief history of O’Connell Street and some thoughts on the way it has been allowed to slide into the sorry state seen in the accompanying photographs, all taken within the past fortnight.
The earliest section of O’Connell Street was laid out in the late 17th century by the land’s then-owner Henry Moore, third Earl of Drogheda who, the vainglorious creature, gave his name to different sections of the development: hence Earl, Henry and Moore Streets (there was once even an Of Lane). Drogheda Street, which ran south from what is now Parnell Street to the junction with Abbey Street, was much narrower than its successor on which work began c.1749 thanks to the vision of that key figure in the development of 18th century Dublin, Luke Gardiner. He was responsible for creating an elongated residential boulevard or mall some fifty feet wide and 1,050 feet long, the centre being a tree-lined public space with granite walls and obelisks topped with oil-fuelled lamp globes.
Gardiner named his development Sackville Street, after the Lord Lieutenant of the time, Lionel Sackville, first Duke of Dorset. It quickly became a fashionable district in which to live. As Maura Shaffrey commented in the Irish Arts Review Yearbook 1988-89, ‘No expense was spared by the wealthy residents of Sackville Street, many of whom were Members of Parliament; they commissioned the best known architects and designers of the day to build, decorate, and fit out their homes in the most elegant styles. The architecture of the east side, built largely for prominent men, was superior to that of the west side which was developed mostly by speculative builder/architects.’ The largest residence of all, Drogheda House, had a sixty-feet frontage on the north corner of what is today Cathedral Street.
Below are two pictures of Sackville Street in its heyday, the first dating from 1843, the second a postcard presumed to be from the late 19th/early 20th century.

At the time of its original development, O’Connell Street only continued as far as the junction with Henry Street, although it was always Gardiner’s intention to extend the thoroughfare as far as the river Liffey. This gradually occurred from the late 1770s onwards, aided by the involvement of Dublin’s Wide Streets Commissioners and by the opening of Carlisle Bridge in 1795: designed by James Gandon, this directly linked the street with the south side of the city. Two significant additions in the first decades of the 19th century were the erection in 1808 of a 121 foot tall granite Doric Column at the junction of the upper and lower sections and topped by a statue of Horatio Nelson, and a decade later the opening of the adjacent General Post Office designed by Francis Johnston.
The arrival of the bridge and the GPO inevitably affected the hitherto-residential character of the street and gradually commercial concerns were established there with the advent of hotels, banks and so forth. Nevertheless, O’Connell Street’s original dignified appearance remained as did many of the 18th century buildings..
With its centre of operations inside the GPO the Easter Rising in 1916 devastated the whole area, much of which was laid waste. However, reconstruction afterwards was rapid; in her book on Dublin Christine Casey notes the rebuilding programme was ‘diverse in expression, united only by restrictions on height, a prescribed cornice level and a predominantly classical vocabulary.’ In fact, this was ample to give the street coherence, as was the widespread use of cut granite for the facades. Some of these have survived, as can be seen below. Unfortunately too many are spoiled by the uncurbed use of signage inappropriate in both size and character.

Over the past ninety years the east side of O’Connell Street has fared better than its western counterpart. Despite some ill-considered shop-frontages, the majority of the former’s buildings remain much as they were redeveloped in the aftermath of the Easter Rising. Among the more significant is Clery’s Department store dating from 1918-22. Its design is indebted to that of Selfridges in London, and it has a splendid Portland Stone facade which, aside from a certain amount of tinkering with some of the details, has largely survived, as have the majority of interior features like the marble staircase.
Further up the same side of the street one finds first the Savoy Cinema and then the Gresham Hotel, both of which again are fronted in Portland stone and assumed their present appearance in the late 1920s. Christine Casey is right to point out that neither display much imagination in their design, and unquestionably the Savoy’s ground floor would benefit from re-ordering, but as she also remarks, ‘the sameness of these 1920s facades is preferable to the more recent dross on the N side of Cathal Brugha Street.’

After almost two centuries, the GPO remains the finest piece of architecture on O’Connell Street, with nothing built since approaching its standards (in itself is a damning indictment of our own era). Of the original building, only Johnston’s facade survives, the structure having been reduced to a shell at the end of the Easter Rising. But what a splendid facade it has, 220 feet long and of fifteen bays, five on each side being granite with rusticated ground floor below two further storeys. The austerity of these two sections contrasts with the centre five bays which feature a full height Portland stone portico with six fluted Ionic columns each 54 inches in diameter. These support a heavily carved entablature and pediment above which are three statues representing Mercury, Fidelity and, in central position, Hibernia. The success of the exterior is due precisely to this combination of austerity and ornamentation, the contrast between the plain side walls with undressed window recesses and the decoration of the portico
When first opened the arches behind the portico were unglazed and formed an arcade secured at close of business by iron gates. However, the building was subject to many alterations during the 19th century, so many indeed that by 1888 removal of internal support walls threatened the entire structure’s collapse. The main hall, memorably described by Christine Casey as being ‘like the lobby of a great Art Deco hotel’ dates from the second half of the 1920s. An Post has recently announced proposals to fill in the courtyard behind in order to create a 1916 museum. As yet no designs have been produced to show what form this might take.

Many of O’Connell Street’s present problems have their origins in the 1970s, although the destruction of Nelson’s Pillar by members of the IRA in March 1966 did not help: the thoroughfare’s appearance suffered from the absence of a monument which matched its grandiose scale. However, within a decade it was the demolition of older buildings and their inferior replacements – such as that now housing a branch of Penneys on the corner of Prince’s Street beside the GPO (built 1976-78) – which most clearly demonstrated the want of interest by relevant authorities in following the example of their forebears and maintaining decent standards of design. In addition, around the same period the first branches of now-ubiquitous fast food outlets arrived on the street, and again no effort was made to restrain their branding so that it was sympathetic to the surrounding environment.

It is the west side of O’Connell Street north from the junction with Henry Street, which has suffered most in the past forty years from poor planning and lack of engagement by Dublin City Council. Astonishingly this section of the street largely survived the effects of the 1916 Rising, but what wasn’t destroyed then has been grossly violated in recent decades. For example, the sandstone facade of the former Standard Life Assurance Company building which dates from 1861 and can be seen in the early postcard of the street a little beyond the GPO still stands, but with its ground floor butchered in the 1970s. Like so many other buildings along here, it is now boarded up and empty and the consequences of neglect are increasingly visible. The same is also true several doors further north where the former Colonial Assurance Company building, constructed 1863 in Ruskinian gothic with tiers of round-headed arches, is likewise unused. Immediately beside this is probably the first post-Independence intervention in the street, a predominantly glass-fronted office block developed in 1959 for Córas Iompair Éireann and now used by Dublin Bus. Of its kind it is by no means unsuccessful but, as frequently tends to be the case here, the building makes no attempt to empathise with its context: on the contrary, it flagrantly ignores the architecture of neighbours.

Further north along the west side of O’Connell Street an already tawdry state of affairs grows rapidly worse, not least thanks to two large vacant sites and to the empty buildings found on either side of them. During the boom years property company Chartered Land spent six years and an estimated €180 million acquiring some 5.5-acres of land here: the intention was to engage in comprehensive redevelopment including 700,000 square feet of retail outlets as well as leisure and residential elements, the whole budgeted at €1.25 billion. In the event, the economic downturn put paid to those notions, which is probably just as well since the scheme proposed was grotesquely over-proportioned and, yet again, completely ignored its surroundings. One especially ludicrous feature was the inclusion of what was trumpeted as a ‘park in the sky’, in other words a public roof garden thirteen storeys above ground: fortunately this part of the project was scrapped before An Bord Pleanála granted permission in March 2010 with building heights limited to around six storeys.
That was almost four years ago and since then nothing has happened, other than the fabric of extant buildings in the ownership of Chartered Land has continued to deteriorate and the character of this part of O’Connell Street has continued to decline. And, as is ever the case, Dublin City Council has continued to do nothing to resolve the situation, allowing this part of O’Connell Street to grow every more shabby.

Below is No. 42 O’Connell Street, the last surviving 18th century house on the thoroughfare. In 1752 the plot on which it stands was leased to Dr Robert Robinson, state physician and Professor of Anatomy at Trinity College, Dublin: four years later the house appeared on Roque’s map of the city. With a red brick facade, of three bays and four storeys over basement, the house’s exterior is most notable for its fine Doric tripartite limestone doorway, the lintel carved with a lion’s head and festoons. Inside there is (or perhaps was, the building has been closed up for some years), a splendid carved wooden staircase and on the first floor front room with beautiful rococo plasterwork. In the 1880s the house became the Catholic Commercial Club, a century later demolition was proposed but somehow it survived, becoming an extension of the atrociously designed and ludicrously named Royal Dublin Hotel, built in the late 1960s and within four decades (rightly) torn down: where it stood is now a large hole in the ground and a wide gap in the street. Meanwhile No. 42 to the immediate south – another part of the Chartered Land site – is left to moulder: a fitting symbol for how much we in Ireland value the buildings left in our care for the benefit of future generations.

After decades of allowing, indeed encouraging, the decline of the capital’s main thoroughfare, in 1998 Dublin City Council announced an O’Connell Street Integrated Area Plan (IAP). However, never known for rushing into action, the authority then lingered another four years before actually engaging in work on the street. Some of what it deemed the more significant features of this project included widening footpaths and the central pedestrian section, the installation of new street furniture and free-standing retail units (although the latter pretty soon disappeared again), the restoration of existing sculptures and on the site of Nelson’s Pillar the installation of a 398-feet high stainless steel pin that was somehow supposed to become a symbol of Dublin in the same way as does the Eiffel Tower for Paris or the Statue of Liberty for New York. Quite how something that resembles an enlarged knitting needle was to accomplish this feat was never satisfactorily explained.
As part of the same regeneration programme, Dublin City Council also cut down all the existing trees on O’Connell Street, some of which had been there for 100 years, and replaced them with other trees. The entire exercise, which took four years to complete, cost no less than €40 million of public money. In addition O’Connell Street has been designated both an Architectural Conservation Area and an Area of Special Planning Control (apparently these safeguards ‘strictly govern all aspects of planning and development on the street’). Furthermore, the majority of the street’s buildings are now classified as Protected Structures. It is exceedingly difficult to understand quite what such designations and classifications have done either to safeguard existing structures or to improve the overall character and appearance of O’Connell Street.

O’Connell Street today is dominated by a sequence of fast-food outlets and gaming arcades, all of which will have applied for, and received permission from the local authority to operate the premises. The elegant thoroughfare created by Luke Gardiner, brought to completion by the Wide Street Commissioners and then carefully recreated in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising by our predecessors has in just a few decades been recklessly and wilfully destroyed. Responsibility for this shoddy state of affairs lies overwhelmingly with Dublin City Council, a body which appears entirely devoid of vision when it comes to urban planning and our built heritage. Pulling up and replanting trees, and extending footpaths while the buildings on either side fall into dereliction smacks of deck chairs and the Titanic. If an Integrated Area Plan is to measure up to its name, every aspect of the street must be included, most especially the appearance and maintenance of structures along its full length. One wonders whether anyone from DCC, either its elected representatives or officials, ever looks at the condition of O’Connell Street, and if so do they feel a hot blush of shame over the condition of the capital’s principal thoroughfare, a condition which they are in the position to improve if only they could bestir themselves. Things have come to a shabby state when even the police station on O’Connell Street has been shut and the space immediately outside on the (expensively widened) pedestrian footpath is treated as an impromptu carpark…

After yesterday’s post on the present appalling condition of O’Connell Street (On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, February 3rd) here is a photograph of the upper west side of the thoroughfare taken in the immediate aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising. Despite all that had taken place during that period, the majority of houses – including No.42 which can seen at the centre of the image – had survived. Yet in the past few decades, thanks to the local authority’s failure to protect Dublin’s heritage, all but one (No.42) have been lost.
One of an album of photographs published after the Rising, you can see the complete collection on Turtle Bunbury’s always-admirable Wistorical site: https://www.facebook.com/Wistorical

A splendid example of Irish 18th century craftsmanship, this George III chimney piece of white marble, Spanish brocatello and scagliola features a frieze inlaid with foliage, rosettes and husk swags centred on a similarly-framed rectangular tablet while carved trophies on either side sit above jambs with tapering panels each inlaid with a nightingale atop a pole wrapped with flowering rose stems. It is believed to have come from 4 Parnell Square, Dublin, a house built in 1754 by Henry Darley, one of a family of stone cutters and developers who was responsible for several other properties in this part of the city. A year later he sold it to Ralph Howard, later first Viscount Wicklow who was presumably responsible for much of the interior decoration including rococo plasterwork attributed to Robert West. No. 4 subsequently passed into the hands of the County Clare Vandeleur family before becoming a residence of the Roman Catholic Archbishops of Dublin. Since 2000 the building has been occupied by a primary school, Gaelscoil Choláiste Mhuire.
Evidently at some date in the last century the chimneypiece which stands just a few inches shy of five feet, was removed from the premises since after being purchased from a Dublin dealer it entered a London collection in the late 1960s. Later this week it comes up for auction in Dorchester where the expected price is £20-40,000. The likelihood of the piece returning to its original location seems remote, but one never knows…
See: http://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/dukes/catalogue-id-2896743/lot-20953363?searchitem=true

A stone spiral staircase leading from first-floor reception rooms to the bedchambers above in Dromore Castle, County Limerick. The exterior of this building, designed by Edward Godwin in the late 1860s, has featured here before (see Une Folie de Grandeur, 30th December 2013). Next Monday’s page will be devoted to exploring what remains of Dromore’s quite extraordinary interiors.

The history of Dromore Castle, County Limerick and the work of its architect Edward William Godwin were discussed here some weeks ago (see Une Folie de Grandeur, 30th December 2013). Today the focus is on what remains of the building’s remarkable interiors since every aspect of their original decoration – furniture, wall paintings, chimney pieces, stained glass, tiles, brass- and ironwork – was likewise overseen by Godwin.
It was in the mid-1860s that William Pery, third Earl of Limerick decided to rectify his lack of a country seat in Ireland where the family had long owned thousands of acres of land in Counties Limerick and Cork. Hitherto when not in England he and his forebears had occupied an 18th century house in Limerick city but this was no longer deemed satisfactory. His decision to create a new rural residence coincided with Lord Limerick’s friendship with Godwin, the two men then respectively serving as President and Vice-President of the Architectural Society in England.

An article on Dromore Castle written by Marian Locke and published in the Winter 2011 issue of the Old Limerick Journal states that Godwin thoroughly explored his prospective client’s estates in search of a site without finding anywhere he deemed suitable before coming across a small shooting lodge owned by the Earl on a piece of land of some forty acres overlooking Dromore Lake. This the architect decided was the perfect spot, ‘a dream-like situation on the edge of a wood…overlooking the water, which would reflect the castle one hundred feet below.’ As indeed it still does, Lord Limerick buying up a further 200 acres, seventy of which were covered by aforementioned water.
So the rocky outcrop on which Dromore stands, and the views offered from this position, made certain other decisions inevitable, not least that the greater part of the accommodation would face north, hardly the best way to ensure the building’s interior would retain heat, or receive much sunlight.

Access to Dromore Castle is through a gateway on the western side and immediately to the south, only accessible by first stepping outside, was the large double-height banqueting hall seen here. This still has its hooded stone chimneypiece, but the minstrels’ gallery has gone along with the pitched timber roof. A door at the far end of the hall gave access to a slender three-storey Chaplain’s Tower which on the first floor in turn opened onto south-facing battlements, concluding in the easterly corner with a small block that originally served as a bakery.
The main portion of the castle runs west to east, with a chapel located on the first floor over the main gateway; above this looms the round tower that is one of Dromore’s more unusual features. Most of the northwest corner is taken up by a stone staircase leading to the first floor where it terminates in an arched gothic window. The shape of this window is echoed by stepped barrow vaulting above the steps, one of Godwin’s most striking effects to survive.

On reaching the top of the main staircase, one turned west along a corridor off which opened a succession of reception rooms inside what, from the exterior, looks like an enormous fortified keep. Thus the entire ground floor was given over to servants’ quarters, with a typically massive kitchen occupying the central portion. A consequence of this arrangement is that the central courtyard was primarily a service area, although a door leading from the southern end of the drawing room opened onto another run of battlements, this time looking eastwards down to the lake (or west into the courtyard). Still, it must have been a drawback that the castle’s owners could not directly enter the surrounding gardens. Perhaps they might not have wished to do so, given the splendour of their surroundings. The drawing room, for example, featured an elaborately carved pink marble chimney piece (which survives, suspended in space), and arched recesses with marble columns (some of which remain in situ) beneath more carved capitals.
Meanwhile up another flight of stairs one reached a further north-facing corridor, its windows set inside deep arched recesses, off which ran the main bedrooms. At the very end of the passage, the north-east corner was given over to the countess’s bedroom which had a stone balcony providing views of the lake far below but this was an advantage enjoyed by nobody else. The third floor was given over to servants’ bedrooms and then, once more in the north-east corner one ascended to the fourth floor billiard room, something of a break with the spirit of medievalism pervading elsewhere.

Although the exterior walls of Dromore Castle are up to six feet thick, from the start it suffered from problems of damp. In an attempt to overcome this problem, Godwin designed a brick lining with a cavity of about two inches from the stonework, but to no avail. In an article on the building carried by Country Life in November 1964, Mark Bence-Jones quotes from a lecture the architect gave in 1878, that is less than a decade after completing his commission, in which he commented ‘Whenever it was going to rain…the walls showed it like a weather glass.’ Thus the elaborate murals he designed for the main rooms never had a chance of survival. At least some of these were executed by Academician Henry Stacy Marks, an artist who specialised in painting birds. At Dromore, however, the plan was for him to cover the walls of the first-floor corridor were to depict the four seasons, twelve months and day and night (complemented by stained glass windows showing the six days of earth’s creation). The dining room murals featured the eight virtues, those of the drawing room the four winds and the four elements. Alas, none could withstand the harsh Irish elements and before long all had perished. Nevertheless, according to Bence-Jones Lord Limerick was ‘extremely delighted’ with his new property, even if this delight did not encourage him to spend much time at Dromore.

According to Marian Locke, Dromore cost in the region of £80,00-£100,000 to build, and yet it was only intermittently occupied by the Limericks for fifty years. After the First World War the family effectively abandoned the property and finally in 1939 the castle and many of its contents along with the surrounding land were sold, reputedly for just £8,000, to a local timber merchant Morgan McMahon. Although he bought the estate primarily for the value of its woodland, Dromore’s new owner was so engaged by the place that he and his family carried out necessary repairs and moved in. They remained in residence until the mid-1950s when it was again sold, but this time there was no reprieve. Faced with costly maintenance and rates, the new owners removed the roof and stripped out the interior. Since then the castle has stood empty, the dividing floors long gone so that now there is no difference between those areas once occupied by master and by servant: today all are equally open to sun and rain, and all share the same patina of neglect. Yet somehow enough of Godwin’s decorative scheme lingers on. It offers a tantalising sense of what Dromore must have looked like during its all too brief, but wondrous, heyday.

This weekend sees the Irish Georgian Society’s annual Traditional Building Skills exhibition take place at the Hunt Museum in Limerick. Visitors might care to look across the road to the current poor state of Patrick Street, including this house No.4, birthplace of the 19th century soprano Catherine Hayes. One of the most celebrated singers of her generation, she performed in opera houses throughout Europe (as well as giving a recital for Queen Victoria in Buckingham Palace in June 1849) before touring to the United States – where P.T. Barnum sponsored her concerts in California – Australia and India. She deserves to be better remembered today in her native city than the condition of this building and its neighbours would indicate.
For further information on the IGS’s activities in Limerick this weekend, see: http://www.igs.ie/uploads/IGS_2014_Traditional_Building_Skills_Brochure_May.pdf

This weekend the grounds of Westport House, County Mayo play host to a music festival. Revellers of sensitive disposition are advised not to venture into the adjacent town as the neglect of its historic core can only lead to feelings of disgust. In the closing decades of the 18th century, the centre of Westport town was laid out by John Browne, third Earl of Altamont (and later first Marquess of Sligo); its design is often attributed to James Wyatt – who was certainly responsible for some of the house’s interiors – but there is no direct evidence to support this.
In any case what cannot be questioned is that Westport has the potential to be one of the most attractive towns in Ireland, a potential which at present is being squandered as the photograph above shows. This is a former coaching inn standing on the North Mall and overlooking the canalised Carrowbeg river. In 1835 John Barrow described it as being a hostelry ‘where the most fastidious could scarcely fail to be pleased’ and seven years later Thackeray called ‘one of the prettiest, comfortablest inns in Ireland.’ The hotel continued in business for over two centuries until 2006 when plans were announced for its refurbishment: since then this crucial site has remained shut, despite Westport being heavily dependant on tourism.
If only this were an isolated case, but worse can be found towards the eastern end of the North Mall where the hotel’s equivalent can be seen below. Of similar date, five bays and two storeys, and originally created as a private residence the building served for many years as a bank until that closed in 2007 since when it has likewise been permitted to fall into the present state of decay. Furthermore the same is true of several other properties along the mall, their roofs sagging, their window frames decaying, the whole spectacle a sad testament to on-going neglect.
Almost 180 years ago John Barrow regarded the North Mall as ‘bearing a close resemblance to a street in a Dutch town’ although it is unlikely any local authority in Holland would allow such dereliction to occur. Mayo County Council’s current development plan for Westport states ‘It is the policy of the Council to maintain, conserve and protect the architectural quality, character and scale of the town.’ Looking at these pictures, it is hard to find evidence of the policy being put into practice. Westport even has a town architect who as recently as last November could be found lecturing the burghers of Fermoy, County Cork on how to improve their historic centre. He would do better to stay at home and ensure the place where he is employed, officially designated a Heritage Town of Ireland, holds onto its heritage before this is lost forever.

Extracted from a letter written by George Henry Moore of Moore Hall, County Mayo to his mother Louisa (née Browne) on 6th May 1846:
‘My dearest Mother,
Corunna won the Chester Cup this day. We win the whole £17,000. This is in fact a little fortune. It will give me the means of being very useful to the poor this season. No tenant of mine shall want for plenty of everything this year, and though I shall expect work in return for hire, I shall take care that whatever work is done shall be for the exclusive benefit of the people themselves. I also wish to give a couple of hundred in mere charity to the poorest people about me or being on my estate, so as to make them more comfortable than they are; for instance, a cow to those who want one most, or something else to those who may have a cow, but want some other article of necessary comfort; indeed I will give £500 in this way. I am sure it will be well expended, and the horses will gallop all the faster with the blessing of the poor…’

Moore Hall dates from 1792 and is believed to have been designed by the Waterford architect John Roberts whose other house in this part of the island, Tyrone, County Galway is also now a gaunt ruin. The Moores were an English settler family originally members of the established church who converted to Roman Catholicism following the marriage of John Moore to Mary Lynch Athy of Galway. Their son George Moore, who likewise married an Irish Catholic, moved to Spain where through his mother’s connections with various Wild Geese families, he became successful and rich in the wine export business. In addition he manufactured iodine, a valuable commodity at the time, and shipped seaweed from Galway for its production, owning a fleet of vessels for this purpose.
Having made his fortune, George Moore then returned to Ireland and bought land to create an estate of some 12,500 acres. He commissioned a residence to be built on Muckloon Hill with wonderful views across Lough Carra below and the prospect of Ballinrobe’s spires in the far distance. Fronted in cut limestone, Moore Hall stands three storeys over sunken basement, the facade centred on a single-bay breakfront with tetrastyle Doric portico below the first floor Venetian window. A date stone indicates it was completed in 1795, three years before Ireland erupted in rebellion. Among those who took part was George Moore’s eldest son John who after being schooled at Douai had studied law in Paris and London had returned to Ireland where he joined the uprising. On August 31st 1798 the French general Jean Joseph Humbert issued a decree proclaiming John Moore President of the Government of the Province of Connacht. However within weeks the British authorities had crushed the rebellion and captured Moore who died the following year while en route to the east coast where he was due to be deported. George Moore, who had spent some £2,500 attempting to secure his heir’s release, had died just a month earlier.

Moore Hall now passed into the hands of its builder’s second son, also called George Moore. A more studious character than his brother, he is known as an historian who wrote accounts of the English Revolution of 1688 (published in 1817) and, on his death, left behind the manuscript of the history of the French Revolution. He married Louisa Browne, a niece of the first Marquess of Sligo, and the couple had three sons, one of whom died at the age of 17 after a fall from his horse. The same fate would befall the youngest child, Augustus Moore when at 28 he was taking part in a race at Liverpool. He and the eldest son, another George, had set up a racing stable at Moore Hall and become notorious for their fearless recklessness. But this George Moore had an intelligent and sensitive character – while still a teenager he was publishing poetry – and following the death of his brother and the advent of famine in Ireland in the mid-1840s he turned his attention to Moore Hall and the welfare of its tenants. The letter quoted above shows that after his horse Corunna won the Chester Cup in May 1846 he used the proceeds to make sure no one on his land suffered hardship or deprivation. In 1847, having already participated in calling for an all-party convention to work for the betterment of Ireland, he was first elected to Parliament where he proved to be a deft orator (his background as a youthful poet came in handy) and an ardent advocate of the country’s rights: he spoke in favour of the Fenians and was an early supporter of the Tenant League, established to secure fair rents and fixity of tenure in the aftermath of the famine. But his philanthropy was George Moore’s undoing. In the spring of 1870 his Ballintubber tenants withheld their rents, judging he would not dare retaliate. Since Parliament was sitting at the time, he returned from London to settle the matter and four days later died as a result of a stroke.

And so Moore Hall passed to the next, and final, generation, being inherited by another George Moore, one of the greatest prose stylists Ireland has produced, a decisive influence on James Joyce and many another Irish author since. Today his contribution to this country, as well as that of his forebears, is insufficiently appreciated, but during his long lifetime George Moore was recognised as a great writer, as well as a serial controversialist. If he is no longer as celebrated as was once the case, then Moore must accept at least some responsibility for this state of affairs since he was given to creating and maintaining feuds with those who by rights should have been his allies. In his wildly entertaining, if not always credible, three-volume memoir Hail and Farewell he explained, ‘It is difficult for me to believe any good of myself. Within the oftentimes bombastic and truculent appearance that I present to the world, trembles a heart shy as a wren in the hedgerow or a mouse along the wainscotting.’ If no match for his father as a horseman, he inherited the latter’s bravado and audaciousness, and as a result created far too many enemies all of whom relished an opportunity to denigrate him. W.B. Yeats called Moore ‘a man carved out of a turnip’, while Yeats’ father considered Moore ‘an elderly blackguard.’ Middleton Murry described him as ‘a yelping terrier’ and Susan Mitchell ‘an ugly old soul.’ Yet they all had to acknowledge his genius. ‘When it comes to writing,’ declared Ford Madox Ford, yet another opponent, ‘George Moore was a wolf – lean, silent, infinitely sweet and solitary.’ The monument erected to him on Castle Island on Lough Carra rightly proclaims:
‘George Moore
Born Moore Hall 1852 died 1933 London
He deserted his family and friends
For his Art
But because he was faithful to his Art
His family and Friends
Reclaimed his ashes for Ireland.’

In keeping with his character, George Moore always had an ambivalent relationship with Moore Hall. He wrote about it often, both in fiction and fact, but spent relatively little of his adult life in the place. For much of the time the estate was run by his younger brother Maurice with whom, like everyone else, he inevitably quarrelled. Unlike most Irish landowners of the era, however, he understood their time was drawing to a close, that the age of the big house was coming to an close and that the class into which he had been born would soon be no more. As he wrote to his brother in 1909, ‘The property won’t last out even my lifetime, that is to say if I live a long while and there will be nothing I’m afraid for your children…You always put on the philosophic air when I speak of the probable future and say “the future is hidden from us.” But the future of landlords isn’t in the least hidden from us.’
Nor was it, although the end was gratuitously harsh. On February 1st 1923 a local regiment of IRA men arrived at Moore Hall in the middle of the night, ordered the steward to hand over keys, moved bales of straw into the house, poured fuel over these and then set the place alight. It was a callous and philistine act which ignored the patriotic history of the Moores and lost the west of Ireland one of its finest Georgian residences. Many years later Benedict Kiely wrote in the Irish Times that he knew someone who had been present when Moore Hall was burnt and who could list various houses in the area containing looted furniture and other items. Envy and spite seem to have been the arsonists’ primary, if not sole, motivation.
Ever since the building has stood empty, the surrounding land today owned by Coillte, a state-sponsored forestry company. With all the sensitivity one might expect from such an organisation, it has planted trees all around the house so that the view down to Lough Carra – the reason Moore Hall was built on this spot – cannot even be glimpsed. There was much talk some few years ago of restoring the building but no more and the final traces of its interior decoration, not least the delicate neo-classical plasterwork, are about to be lost. So this is how Ireland honours her own: more in the breach than in the observance.

Kilconnell Friary, County Galway

‘To delight in the aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows the note of perversity.’ From Italian Hours (1873) by Henry James.

Tyrone House, County Galway

‘I salute you, lonely ruins. While your aspect repulses with a secret fear the gaze of the vulgar, my heart finds in contemplating you the charm of a thousand sentiments and thoughts. How many useful lessons and touching reflections do you not offer to the spirit which knows how to consult you!’
From Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791) by Constantin François Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney.

Mount Shannon, County Limerick

‘I do love these ancient ruins
We never tread upon them but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history;
And, questionless, here in this open court,
Which now lies naked to the injuries
Of stormy weather, some men lie interr’d
Lov’d the church so well, and gave so largely to ’t,
They thought it should have canopied their bones
Till dooms-day. But all things have their end;
Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men,
Must have like death that we have.’
From The Duchess of Malfi (1612) by John Webster.

Former Church of Ireland church, Rathcormac, County Cork

‘The ideas aroused within me by ruins are lofty. Everything vanishes, everything perishes, everything passes away, only the world remains, time alone endures. How old is this world! I walk between these two eternities…What is my ephemeral existence compared to that of this crumbling stone?’
From Denis Diderot’s Salon (1767).

Duckett’s Grove, County Carlow

‘At fifteen I went with the army,
At fourscore I came home.
On the way I met a man from the village,
I asked him who there was at home.
That over there is your house,
All covered over with trees and bushes.
Rabbits had run in at the dog-hole,
Pheasants flew down from the beams of the roof.
In the courtyard was growing some wild grain;
And by the well, some wild mallows.
I’ll boil the grain and make porridge,
I’ll pluck the mallows and make soup.
Soup and porridge are both cooked,
But there is no one to eat them with.
I went out and looked towards the east,
While tears fell and wetted my clothes.’
Chinese poem by an unknown author, translated by Arthur Waley (1919).

Belan, County Kildare

‘What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see
The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way
O’er steps of broken thrones and temples, ye
Whose agonies are evils of a day! A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay. . . .
Then let the winds howl on! Their harmony
Shall henceforth be my music, and the night
The sound shall temper with the owlets’ cry,
As I now hear them in the fading light…’
From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) by Lord Byron.

Dromore, County Limerick

‘Where rev’rend shrines in gothic grandeur stood,
The nettle, or the noxious night-shade spreads;
And ashlings, wafted from the neighboring wood,
Through the worn turrets wave their trembling heads.
I left the mantling shade in moral mood . . .
Sigh’d, as the mould’ring monuments I viewed.
Inexorably calm, with silent pace,
Here Time has pass’d What ruin marks his way!
This pile, now crumbling o’er its hallow’d base,
Turn’d not his step, nor could his course delay.’
From Poems chiefly Pastoral (1766) by John Cunningham.

‘Fall’n, fall’n, a silent heap; her heroes all
Sunk in their urns; behold the pride of pomp.
The throne of nations fall’n; obscur’d by dust;
Ev’n yet majestical; the solemn scene
Elates the soul, while now the rising Sun
Flames on the ruins in the purer air
Towering aloft upon the glittering plain,
Like broken rocks, a vast circumference;
Rent palaces, crush’d columns, rifled moles…’
From The Ruins of Rome (1740) by John Dyer.

Downhill, County Derry

‘…Since first these ruins fell, how chang’d the scene!
What busy, bustling mortals, now unknown,
Have come and gone, as tho’ there nought had been,
Since first Oblivion call’d the spot her own.

Ye busy, bustling mortals, known before,
Of what you’ve done, where went, or what you see,
Of what your hopes attain’d to, (now no more,)
For everlasting lies a mystery.

Like yours, awaits for me that common lot;
‘Tis mine to be of every hope bereft:
A few more years and I shall be forgot,
And not a vestige of my memory left.’
From Elegy on the Ruins of Pickworth (1818) by John Clare

Shane’s Castle, County Antrim

‘Amidst the gloom arose the ruins of the abbey, tinged with a bright ray, which discovered a profusion of rich Gothic workmanship; and exhibited in pleasing contrast the grey stone of which the ruins are composed, with the feathering foliage that floated round them. . . . The imagination formed it, after the vision vanished.’
From Observations on the River Wye, and several parts of South Wales, etc. relative chiefly to picturesque beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770 (1782) by William Gilpin.

Folly at Bellevue, County Galway

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

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?

‘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 terrace of four houses, those at either end having advanced and pedimented bays, in Rockcorry, County Monaghan. A plaque in each pediment advises ‘These houses were built by Jos. Griffiths for destitute widows A.D. 1847.’ Solidly built with rusticated quoins and red-brick trim around doors and windows, the terrace now stands empty and itself faces destitution. Here is a building that, having served the local community for many years, is today in turn deserving of charity.

Around the corner from St Catherine’s church on Thomas Street, Dublin and indeed integrated into that building is this residence on Thomas Court, probably the former presbytery. The Gibbsian doorcase and carriage arch are typical of the 1760s when the church was rebuilt to John Smyth’s design and according to Graham Hickey of the Dublin Civic Trust, ‘the L-shaped plan of the house accords with John Rocque’s depiction of the site on his map of 1756, before the church was rebuilt, lending the tantalising possibility that it incorporates early fabric. It almost certainly contains recycled material from the previous building. It has since lost its original roof to a flat 20th-century affair.’
Seriously altered in the second half of the last century when converted into a number of residential units, the building then suffered damage as a result of a fire last winter. It now looks to be in very poor state and unless remedial work is undertaken soon the only outcome will be further decline and, as has happened far too often in this country, the threat of demolition due to claims of the property being in dangerous condition.

The former stables at Dartrey, County Monaghan. Dating from the mid-18th century, this range is wonderfully sited close to the main lake on the estate, a canted wing to the right offering views across the water. Like other buildings at Dartrey, the two-storey structure is built of red brick with cut limestone employed for door cases and window sills. There is a second, 19th century stable yard elsewhere on the estate and, at least for the present, it is in better condition than this one, most of which despite its name now appears far from stable.

Travelling along a minor road in County Kilkenny, one suddenly sees what looks like the ruins of an immense castle on the horizon. Only when in the immediate vicinity does it become apparent that this is, in fact, an industrial building the original purpose of which has been disguised. Erected on the banks of the river Barrow primarily of limestone with a cut-granite battlemented parapet, the early 19th century six-storey flour mill at Barraghcore dates testifies to the prosperity of this part of the country during that period. Subsequently becoming a malthouse, it continued in operation until the early 1970s when the roof was removed to avoid payment of rates. So sturdily was it built that even after more than forty years in this condition the mill remains standing, but cracks are beginning to appear especially arond the corner turret and its future could yet be in jeopardy.

The facade of 3 Henrietta Street, Dublin. Of four bays and four storeys over basement, the house dates from c.1754 when Owen Wynne of Hazelwood, County Sligo married the Hon Anne Maxwell, daughter of John, first Lord Farnham who occupied the building next door. (For more information on Hazelwood, see Sola, Perduta, Abbandonata*, February 25th 2013). Like many other properties along the street, in the late 19th century No. 3 was divided into tenements and has yet to recover from this fate; in more recent times, it has suffered from water ingress and subsequent timber decay. Its circumstances were not helped by a recent fire immediately outside the property: while the relevant services were able to train their hoses to a certain height, they did not reach the upper section, hence the evidence of smoke damage on already highly vulnerable brickwork.