Tag: university college dublin

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Architects Architecture Country Houses

Drum Manor Cookstown Tyrone + Irish Georgian Society London + Ulster Architectural Heritage Society

Lambeg

“Ruins in Ireland have always been political in light of the country’s history,” lectured University College Dublin Professor Fiona O’Kane to the Irish Georgian Society London some years ago. “In contrast, they possess an insouciance in English paintings. Ruins can be framing devices to real landscape. But the perception of how Ireland is drawn carries a long shadow. There’s a constant iterative of land.” Nothing frames a real landscape better than the remains of Drum Manor outside Cookstown in Ulster’s “West of the Bann” territory. The description of a torn history.

The Ulster Architectural Heritage Society’s latest addition to the country house book genre is Kimmitt Dean’s The Plight of the Big House in Northern Ireland. The writer reports that then owner Augusta Le Vicomte and her second husband Henry James Stewart went to town and country on her inherited house, William Hastings of Belfast in 1869 “hugely extending the existing villa”. It was executed in that Hilary Mantel stoked Tudor soaked Elizabethan oaked castellated vein that architects so excelled at across 19th century Ireland. But then, he summarises, “It was acquired by the Forestry Service in 1964 with consequences for the house, being partly demolished in 1975 to leave the present shell.” The destruction in part of a big house.

At least the damson’d gardens and rolling parkland remain and are open to the public. A silent drum beats again. Balustrades and battlements and buttresses protecting nothing and going nowhere. Transoms and mullions holding air. Crocketed pinnacles pointing heavenward. Metre high green carpet pile. Pearl necklaced capitals. A damsel’d Ayesha Castle tower with no Enya to come to its rescue. And yet Drum Manor has fared slightly better than its neighbour Pomeroy House. All that remains of the latter is a derelict portion of the stable block outbuilding. An adjacent marking on the ground provides a ghostly outline of the house’s footprint encircled by forestry. The demise of a demesne.

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Architecture People

Doe Castle Donegal + Rory O’Donnell

Adhere | The Fight of the Earl | To Crown It All

The 19th century German traveller Johann Kohl maintained, “Irish ruins generally wear a very picturesque look.” That may bear some truth but if left entirely to nature’s devices, ruins disappear. Professor Finola O’Kane Crimmins, lecturer at University College Dublin, is a specialist in Ireland and the Picturesque. “There is an insouciance in English paintings of ruins,” she believes. “They are often used as framing devices. But ruins in Ireland have always been political in light of the country’s history.”

Doe Castle, sitting on a promontory jutting into Sheephaven Bay, County Donegal, is as picturesque as they come. It looks for all the world like a Scottish Highlands shortbread tin lid. Even more so recently, thanks to the addition of a striking high pitched roof bravely accentuating its silhouette. The roof is one of several daring interventions carried out by the Office of Public Works. Limewashing the keep and constructing new plinth walls are two others.

“Doe” is derived from the Gaelic word “Tuath” meaning territory. The castle was for a time the stronghold of the MacSweeney Clan who had three territories stretching from Rosgoill in the east to Gweedore in the west. It is first mentioned in the Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland in 1544 although the four storey keep is probably older. Naturally it has a history as bloody as a Donegal foreland. “The iterative cycle of land,” observes Professor O’Kane Crimmins. Historian Brian de Breffny wrote in 1977, “For many years the ownership of the castle was fought over and disputed incessantly.” Rory O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, was granted custody of the castle by Royal Warranty for a fleeting three years at the turn of the 17th century.

There’s more. Adopting a portmanteau, Brian de Breffny also wrote, “The Government then compelled the Earl to allow Sir Basil Brooke to occupy Doe and its lands. The Earl of Tyrconnell sailed for the Continent from Lough Swilly in 1607, never to return, and Castledoe was once again in Crown hands.”  Beyond the battlemented and buttressed and buffeted bawn, in sight of the haunted keep, sloping down to the water’s edge, is a well kept graveyard. The tombstone set in a wall of the wife of Captain John Sandford who bought Doe Castle in 1614 reads: “Heere Lyeth the bodie of Anne Sanforde Late Wife Vnto Captain John Sanforde Who Desesed The 13 of Jvly Anno Domeni 1621 For Whose Sake This Chapell was Ercted” [lots of sic].