SUMMER SEASON: Conservationist Finola O'Kane strolls around one of her favourite childhood haunts, the Castletown estate, in Co Kildare, with her five-year-old in tow
When I began to go to Castletown House regularly, sometime in the mid 1990s, I could travel with singular focus and little comment. Now slowed down to a stroll by my young daughter, I find myself wondering if five is a reasonable age at which to begin enforced cross-country orienteering: to clamber through the overgrowth and undergrowth of Castletown's Co Kildare landscape; to find Lady Louisa Conolly's gardens. I remember with some guilt my own metre-high sister, hauled across a headland to a "fairy" fort, only to find herself surrounded by cows. Then I dream of swinging off down the curvy drives with the children in a horse-drawn carriage, vistas passing by in swift succession, framed by the great specimen oaks and beeches, which Conolly planted but never saw. Free from pedestrian speed and height and the effort of describing the bigger picture by being finally within it.
As Conolly surmised, children have their own viewpoints. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher-pedagogue whose books were in Conolly's library, believed that children orient themselves quite precisely in the world, each making their own "very simple map, at first containing only two places", then adding others when "able to estimate their distance and position".
On my way to the Forty Foot, in Sandycove, Co Dublin, one Saturday, with a five-year-old in tow, a castellated suburban seaside house became a source of great puzzlement. How could a castle be in the wrong place and so small, my daughter asked. Bribed as a child with buttery scones in the castellated Glin gatehouse, on the way to Co Kerry, I remember the castle conundrum myself.
Celbridge is fortunate to have Castletown demesne at the bottom of its main street. Its inhabitants meander down the lime avenue and cross the parkland to Tom Conolly's old racing ground. Dogs and their owners exercise near his kennels. Willows dabble their branches near the rocks Louisa placed on the riverbed. Children on ponies from the neighbouring riding schools dart down the grassy banks, terrifying the unwary walker. Conolly planned a children's garden for her nephews and nieces in 1775, and she gave much thought to their experience of her landscape garden.
They took care of her birds and animals in the pheasantries, hen houses and miniature farms dotted for their amusement and education at outlying stations of the estate. They performed in its natural theatres, appearing in mime shows outside the dairy and painting their "faces with Red to a degree of Horror". Drawing masters took their charges outside to paint their own landscape views.
Today's children play hide and seek, make houses in the tall grass and indulge in other more teenage pursuits. I wonder if the rusted hulk of a burnt-out car still looms over the rococo stonework of Conolly's third cascade.
A riverside walk is pleasant in the summer, particularly when the sea is some distance away. Conolly was fortunate to have the Liffey at the bottom of her garden, and, although you cannot see the river from the front steps of the house, you will reach it if you climb over the iron railing and set off through the front park. Conolly began to design her walk, a "new piece of work" to "make Castletown beautifull", in 1767; that summer her contractor, Mr Brian Kavanagh, and his many men moved 1,668 square yards of earth by hand, scooping it up and relaying it to make little "rising grounds". It was all done "in a very tasty way", with bare rocks piled into "pretty romantic seats close to the water's edge" and surrounded with willows, which she hoped would "weep the right way".
Her walk has two levels, which swivel and intertwine. To walk on the upper level is to command the broad, powerful views of Castletown House, the distant Wicklow Mountains and the interlinked follies and country houses.
Secluded on the lower level, and concealed from the eyes of Castletown's enormous facade, lie the ruins of her bathing house, which she built for Liffey swims. She designed it herself, making a portico from some wooden doorcase pillars taken from the Castletown gallery and mounted on plinths of creamy Portland stone. Its interior had a coved stucco ceiling, a Scotch hearthstone, a coal hole and a chimney piece, and a stone urn and pedestal decorated its garden of flowers and shrubs.
Over 330 years later, Castletown demesne, like many others around the country, is at risk. With one bite after another, our historic landscapes are being consumed by development until only the bare core of the apple remains. Pondering their conservation from my adult and professional perspective, I take heart from my daughter's company. The only improvement Conolly's riverside walk requires for her is a Batman boogie board.
Finola O'Kane lectures in architecture and conservation at University College Dublin; she is also the author of Landscape Design in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, published by Cork University Press, €59