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Killymoon Castle + Estate Cookstown Tyrone

The First of the Best Two Days

It was the poster boy of the 1970s, gracing the covers of various publications. Half a century later, a new generation of aesthetes is falling in love with the romantically named and romantically styled and romantically positioned Killymoon Castle. Richard Oram and Peter Rankin included a sketch of the south elevation on the cover of their Ulster Architectural Heritage Society Listings for Cookstown and Dungannon. “The Nash block is of ashlar, a strong roll moulding surrounding it at basement level. Behind, the earlier back-quarters are of rubble, castellated, buttresses added and certain windows enlarged by Nash, the roofs of graduated slates… Behind the house, a stable and farmyard, including a substantial two storey block with Gibbsian door surrounds.”

In another Ulster Architectural Heritage Society publication from last century, An Introduction to Ulster Architecture, Hugh Dixon, wrote, “Interest in the picturesque resulted in the Gothick castle style becoming a fashionable alternative to the neoclassical for country houses. Pioneered by Richard Payne Knight at Downton Castle, Herefordshire, the asymmetrical castle was made popular by the Prince Regent’s architect, John Nash, whose large practice extended to Ulster on several occasions. Killymoon Castle is clearly a sham unlike Gosford Castle (by Thomas Hopper, circa 1820) at Markethill, County Armagh, where really thick walls and correct medieval windows show a new more serious approach. Generally more popular in Ulster was the symmetrical castle, a type developed by Robert Adam in Scotland. Adam, indeed, remodelled Castle Upton in County Antrim (1788) in this style, although it has had later alterations. Among the best local designs are Necarne, Irvinestown, County Fermanagh (circa 1825) and the delightfully simple Dungiven Castle, County Derry (1839).”

Brian de Breffny included Killymoon in his Castles of Ireland and featured it on the dust jacket. “John Nash, the celebrated architect of Regency England, also designed a few buildings in Ireland, including some parish churches and four Gothick castles, two of which are Killymoon and Lough Cutra. Shanbally Castle, County Tipperary, which he built about 1812, was larger than either of these. The fourth castle, Kilwaughter, County Antrim, is a not very successful adaptation of an earlier house, and is now in a state of disrepair… Before he was engaged in radically transforming parts of London by such creations as Regent’s Park, Regent’s Street, Trafalgar Square and Carlton House Terrace, and before his work on Brighton Pavilion. It brought him other Irish commissions through the family connections of James Stewart, Member of Parliament for County Tyrone, the satisfied client… The house at Killymoon built by James Stewart’s father, William Stewart, who also built the nearby town of Cookstown about 1750, was largely destroyed by fire about 1800.”

Each publication has a different take on its castellation: the dressing of the original castle to complement the new building; the light hearted asymmetry; and the heralding of the architect’s popularity for designing castles in Ireland. Killymoon Castle was John Nash’s first – and finest – castle in Ireland. Dorothy Coulter, who lives in the castle with her husband Godfrey, knows its history well. “Killymoon Castle was built in 1671 by James Stewart who had bought the lease five years earlier from Alan Cooke, the founder of Cookstown. The Stewarts had come over from Scotland during the Plantation of Ulster. They set up two castles at that time: Killymoon and Ballymena Castle. Six generations later, the Stewarts left Killymoon in 1852. There are six houses built by the Stewarts still in Cookstown Old Town.”

The original building was mostly destroyed by fire in 1802. Dorothy reckons, “Colonel James Stewart built this castle a year later and it must have been a truly wonderful fairy tale to bring his beautiful wife Lady Molesworth to this romantic spot!” She points to his portrait in the central hall. “He met John Nash on his Grand Tour. James frequently visited London to gamble with the Prince Regent at Carlton House. Apparently he gambled Killymoon Castle one night with Prince Regent and lost it on the turn of the cards. I don’t envy him coming back to his wife after that! Fortunately the Prince Regent told him he could keep his ‘Irish cabin’. The other portrait is of his father William Stewart. He brought James back from the Grand Tour as he wanted him to stand for MP for Tyrone and he stood and he had the seat for 44 years. He was well liked. The estate changed hands several times after the Stewarts until timber merchant Gerald Macura bought it in 1916. He wanted to make railway sleepers from felling the trees.”

The Public Records Office Northern Ireland’s Introduction to Stewart of Killymoon Papers, 2007, sheds some light on Lady Molesworth, “In 1772 Stewart married Elizabeth Molesworth, daughter of the 3rd Viscount Molesworth. She was one of the survivors of a tragic fire in London in 1763, where she was living with her widowed mother. Lady Molesworth senior, two of her daughters and six of the servants were killed. Two other daughters were badly injured when they jumped from upper windows – one had to have her leg cut off after landing on the railings below – and a third was badly burned. Elizabeth Stewart became in 1794 a co-heiress of her late brother, the 4th Viscount Molesworth, and inherited a share of the Molesworth estates in Dublin City, near Swords, County Dublin, and in and around Philipstown, King’s County.”

A castle is not a castle without a ghost. Dorothy relates, “Gerald Macura’s 97 year old daughter came to visit us a couple of years ago. She’d such fond memories of the castle and told me how as a six year old child she used to hear ghostly footsteps going up and down the secondary staircase. She had that story built up in her head all those years. I said to her, ‘But there only is one staircase!’ We went on a tour of the house and upstairs she showed me something. There were so many different layers of paint over the door you could only see the shape of the frame so when we looked into that cupboard there was this other door that opened into a set of stairs that went up to James’s room in the top of the circular tower! He had a whole big bedroom suite that went out onto the balcony. She said it was really just the joy of her life getting back to Killymoon; she died not long afterward.”

Dorothy reveals, “My husband’s great grandparents lived over the bridge past those trees and these grounds came up for sale. His great grandfather John Coulter bid £2,000 on the grounds but all the bids were rejected. So six months later the Bank of Ireland put it up for sale again and he increased his bid by an extra £100 and this time it was to include the castle. He was successful so everyone thinks it was a great deal as he got the castle for £100! They moved in with their two sons Tommy and Jacky at the end of 1921.”

A suitably long drive winds through parkland and farmland, past the château-like 18th century stable block to one side, until the porte cochère of the castle finally appears. And there it is, the castle in all its glory, one of the great architectural moments of early 19th century Ireland – still unrivalled in early 21st century Ireland. The genius at work: rectangular, elliptical and polygonal components of varying heights fitting together like the pieces of an intricate three-dimensional puzzle, unified by Gothick windows, Romanesque detailing and a castellated roofline. John Nash added buttresses to the adjoining remaining portion of the old rubble stone castle and remodelled some of its windows to be more in keeping with his cut stone architectural masterpiece.

The interior is equally ingenious. A slender row of stairs connects the porte cochère to the tall spacious central hall. The piano nobile is elevated by a raised basement. “That’s the Stewart and Molesworth coats of arms in the stained glass over the front door,” highlights Dorothy. The central hall is linked by a Gothick arch to the staircase hall with its cantilevered stone stairs flying off in opposite directions like the wings of a dinosaur. John Nash knew how to deliver drama! Another great spatial flow running parallel with the inner halls is formed by an enfilade of four adjoining reception rooms overlooking the sloping lawn and field down to Ballinderry River. The variety of room shapes seems endless. Apses and niches and balconies and vestibules show such a grasp of spatial acuity. Oak detailing and ornate plasterwork define and refine the interior throughout. Window shutters concertina out from hidden cavities in the external walls. One of the reception rooms has 1800s wallpaper which survived a major flood.

Dorothy continues, “American soldiers occupied the estate from December 1943 to February 1944. Officers stayed in the castle while paratroopers were housed in Quonset huts. It was the 82nd Airbourne Division that was stationed here. We have retained one of the brick huts built near the river as a cottage for holidaymakers. One of the castle bedrooms has been restored as an officer’s room with militaria and uniformed mannequins. The cellars are now a military museum with a permanent signal post, muster station and officers’ mess. There was a German prison of war camp at the top end of the town. We’ve a lot of letters from the American and German soldiers – they’re all down in the cellars. Killymoon is part of the heritage of Cookstown. It needs people in it to keep it alive.”

“We decided whenever we got married to restore the long end of the castle in the 1970s. Tommy lived down in the back end of the castle.” She continues the tour, “In 2000 we restored the big upstairs library. This room was in ruins – the ceiling was completely down, there were trees growing in it. I said to the builders there’s a ceiling like Nash’s original one here in Kildress Parish Church. They were able to copy the church’s ribbed plasterwork ceiling. The timber floor is new too. The only original features to survive are the windows which date back to the 1600s. One of the bedrooms had no ceiling as well. It was like the planetarium where you could look right up to the sky!”

“We started to restore the roof lantern over the staircase in 2014,” Dorothy recalls. “It had been badly damaged when the Golf Clubhouse was bombed in about 1989.” Since 1889, part of the estate has been Killymoon Golf Club. “Eventually we did get help with the restoration of the roof lantern: the Northern Ireland Environment Agency were very good and we’ve worked with Cookstown Council. Our architects, builders and craftsmen have all been local – real godsends. We’ve been very blessed and are very thankful. Recently, we’ve been working with the Tourist Board promotion ‘Embrace a Giant Spirit’. We won ‘Best Maintenance of a Historic Building or Place at the 2021 Heritage Angel Awards Northern Ireland.”

She adds, “In 2016 we opened the tearoom. On our first day the queue of people stretched down the drive! Our candlelit Christmas dinners have proved a real success. We’re sold out already. It’s a family affair – the grandchildren get their dusters out and we light all the fires. When you see the castle being used for different functions, it brings it to life. We’ve had people visit here from all over the world. We are very busy with group tours too.” Today, afternoon tea is served in the east and south facing Lady Molesworth’s morning room with views (once admired by Queen Mary, wife of King George V) across the 122 hectare estate. Under the shallow dome laced by a patera frieze, potato and leek soup is served in china cups on saucers. Grandfather clocks tick and chime to the passing of time.

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Architects Architecture Town Houses

Tower Walk St Katharine Dock London + Taylor Woodrow

The Faerie Queene

Even by late Eighties’ standards, the hard copy brochure of Tower Walk is impressive in looks and substance. Under the watercolour decorated cover, between patterned lining paper a millennium history of St Katharine Docks (somewhere along the way the saint lost her apostrophe and final S) is followed by interior photographs and axonometric floor plans. One of the later sections of the history entitled “A New Lease of Life” succinctly explains,

“After the dock closed in 1968, it was sold to the Greater London Council who put out a tender for its redevelopment. Taylor Woodrow’s successful scheme comprised a World Trade Centre, a hotel and offices and residential units around a busy yacht haven. The scheme was formally adopted on St Katharine’s Day 1969 and work began on the Tower Hotel. Two decades ago, when the first bricks of this first building was laid, St Katharine’s was a drab, derelict and forbidding site. It took great vision to see the potential of what stands here today.”

Tower Walk is a gently curved terrace of five almost identical planned terraced houses (two storey over basement under setback) flanked by matching irregular shaped end houses rising above integral garages. It is an island (or at very least a peninsula) site location encircled by tourism: to the north floats Gloriana, The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Barge; to the east is The Dickens Inn; to the south, the River Thames.

The brochure grandly continues: “Tower Walk, a new crescent of seven luxury residences, has been built to commemorate the departure of the Royal Foundation of St Katharine to Regent’s Park in 1826. In the style of Nash and overlooking the haven with its many yachts, motor cruisers and historic Thames sailing barges, it offers unique, very spacious and classical living space in this fascinating corner of the City.”

John Nash on steroids maybe. Architects Watkins Gray International’s design is a funky hunky chunky postmodern take on neoclassicism and a strangely successful one at that. Tower Walk is bursting with brio from its bulky columns to more Juliet balconies than Verona. It has an incredible depth of form and massing. A freestanding centrally placed porthole pierced pediment on each of the principal fronts presides over the monumental cornice. The stucco is a throwback to domestic Regency; those columns are a nod to warehouse heritage. This was a stylistic departure not to be repeated by Watkins Gray International. Their World Trade Centre Building and Commodity Quay, both on St Katharine Dock, are more typical of the practice’s output: commercial modernism.

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Architects Architecture Art People

St Andrew’s Church + Goodwin Sands Deal Kent

The Memory of the Just is Blessed

Deal on the east coast of Kent is a microcosm of the best of Britishness with a heavy dose of end-of-the-line quirkiness. The winding lanes of the old smuggling quarter are awash with quaint cottages, some called after other places in Britain like Fleet, Mendham, Rutland and Stockport. The cutely named Ticklebelly Alley meanders from the railway station to a quiet Victorian residential enclave adjacent to the old smuggling quarter. Its streets are patriotically named after the Patron Saints of the British Isles: St Andrew’s, St David’s, St George’s and St Patrick’s Road. To the north of St Andrew’s Road at the very top of the area (apropos considering the map of the British Isles) lies a church named after the Patron Saint of Scotland.

The Early English style St Andrew’s Anglo Catholic Church was built in 1850 to the design of Ambrose Poynter on the 0.4 hectare site of a workhouse. Then 15 years later, the chancel was extended and vestries were added in Earlyish English style. Chapels were added in the closing decade of the 19th century. Use of Kentish ragstone with Caen stone dressings throughout suggest a cohesive timelessness. Eight salvaged medieval gargoyles protrude from the sturdy buttressed steeple. Domestic looking dormers in the tiled roof light the aisles. Ambrose Poynter was a pupil of John Nash between 1814 and 1818.

On the Second Sunday Before Lent 2018 Father Paul Blanch, the interim Priest in Charge, preached at St Andrew’s, “Our reasons as to why we choose to be here are not necessarily wrong,” referring to a recently circulated survey asking parishioners to state their reasons for churchgoing. “No, they are important to each of us in different ways. But what is important to us all is that the Church is the sacramental presence of Jesus Christ and when we come together, when we gather, we make Church. We make Jesus present in a special way. We become His body which exists for us and we continue to make Him present for those outside of the Church, as much as for ourselves. As the late Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple said it is the only society that exists for those outside it and our priority as the Church must be the needs of the most vulnerable of God’s world.”

St Andrew’s Church lies just 380 metres inland as the dove would fly from the English Channel coast (and a mere 42 kilometres dove flying from Calais) with its mysterious disappearing and reappearing Goodwin Sands. Anyone for cricket? Yes but only in summer and not just because cricket is a seasonal sport. These 16 kilometre long sandbanks, 10 kilometres out from the coast, were only associated with shipwrecks until some sporting locals started playing cricket matches in the high summers of the 1820s during low tide. The tradition continues two centuries later. Even in the rolling sea billows of midwinter, glimpses can be seen from Deal of Goodwin Sands.

A horsebox is parked along Beach Street between The Bohemian bar and the entrance to Deal Pier. A sign on a kitchen chair on the pavement next to the horsebox reads: “Following on from my previous horsebox exhibition The Rolling Roving Insect Show, this exhibition, my work is all one. My latest work ‘Something About Time’ can be seen within (it has been designed to be viewed singularly / close companions) a single seat is offered and whilst viewing I ask (for it is not mandatory) the observer to read and say out aloud to themselves, ‘Time, is as is, as I am here now.’” Inside the horsebox, an enigmatic hanging ball of silver cord and exquisitely cast silver insects are reflected in a seemingly bottomless well which is really a beer keg filled with water­. “My show is all about time,” reasserts artist Jeremy P. Deal of the centuries.

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Architects Architecture Developers People Town Houses

Carlton Crescent Southampton + Samuel Toomer

The City and the Pillars

Carlton Crescent Conservation Area Southampton Architecture © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

What does Pevsner have to say? “The most spectacular piece of Regency development in Southampton… The Crescent starts at London Road and curves northwest, composed in the main of broad three bay three storey stuccoed detached houses linked together by screen walls, mostly sufficiently close to each other for the street, except in a few places, to appear as a piece of unified townscape. The houses vary in detail but are mostly the same in general composition, typical of Southampton with their elements of classical decoration almost without refinements…”

Carlton Crescent Conservation Area Southampton Building © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Carlton Crescent Conservation Area Southampton Townhouse © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Carlton Crescent Conservation Area Southampton House © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Carlton Crescent Conservation Area Southampton Terrace © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

A little piece of Brighton gone west; a miniature Regent’s Park flown south. On the cusp of the maritime city’s decline as a spa resort and its rise as a merchant port, riding the crest of this wave, businessman Edward Toomer (1764 to 1852) fortuitously bought land to the southwest of the verdant pearl that is Asylum Green. Even more fortuitously, his son Samuel (1801 to 1842) was an architect. This provincial John Nash was responsible for designing many of the houses on and around Carlton Crescent.

Carlton Crescent Conservation Area Southampton Balcony © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

The area has a unified appearance, thanks in no small part to being wilfully stuccoed to the nines (except for tile hung flank walls and returns), but was actually developed over two decades beginning in 1825. It is first mentioned in that same year in the Hampshire Chronicle, “Carlton Crescent has this season made its appearance and contains eight handsomely built residences; being detached, these will, when finished, form by far the handsomest line of houses in Southampton.” They still do.

Carlton Crescent Conservation Area Southampton © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley