HERE, traveller, scholar, poet take your stand
When all those rooms and passages are gone,
When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound
And saplings root among the broken stone...
YEATS'S words about Coole Park, written long before the home of Lady Gregory was demolished in 1941, are applicable to a great many other Irish country houses. Although some still remain, a few even in the hands of the same family for whom they were originally built, others are now no more than a handful of stones, if even that much has survived the vicissitudes of the present century. Perhaps this is why these buildings exercise a more powerfully romantic appeal than their English equivalents and have inspired so many books; constructed usually by conquerors, they survived precariously, and with the disappearance of the class they were meant to house, their own decline became inevitable. A year ago Peter Somerville-Large published a chronicle on social life in Irish country houses; now Mark Bence-Jones covers similar territory, examining properties throughout the country.
Mr Bence-Jones makes it clear that few Irish country houses could be confident of their future. The now-vanished Mitchelstown Castle, for example, intended to be bigger than any other house in Ireland, cost more than £100,000 to construct in the 1820s; within half a century it carried a crippling mortgage of £236,000. Up-keep was often so ruinous that necessary maintenance might be overlooked.
Although obviously much more comfortably housed than their tenants, landlords sometimes had make do with primitive sanitary arrangements. Many such properties had only one bath, and Barmeath Castle in Co Louth was not untypical in only acquiring indoor plumbing at the end of the 19th century. It was finally installed after the house's owner, Lord Bellew, visited the outdoor privy without realising a greyhound was having her puppies under the seat. When he sat down, he was bitten.
Irish country-house owners in the last century were notorious for living beyond their means, with detrimental effects on their property. Gambling was a common problem; the last Lady Wallscourt ran up such serious gambling debts at the beginning of this century that she sold the lead off the roof of the family home, Ardfry in Co Galway, leaving the building to fall into decay.
Perhaps the reason so many of her class took to the card tables was that life on their estates could be solitary and dull. "We are all going on here in a vegetating sort of state," wrote Georgiana, Countess of Longford, from Tullynally Castle (as it is now called) in 1838. "The place and country are quite beautiful, but l must say it is very triste to be here for days together without having communication with anyone but the governess and children."
Even country house parties could be tedious enough, if guests were not terribly interested in shooting and fishing; a page from a scrapbook recording a visit to Adare Manor in 1892 notes that during the party some 733 pheasants were shot and no less than 1,080 rabbits.
No wonder so many members of these families were writers; Maria Edgeworth was unusual in that her authorship was so financially successful, she eventually managed to buy the family seat from her impoverished half-brother. Amateur theatricals provided a welcome distraction at Edgeworthstown, as they did also at Gurteen Le Poer where, during the first World War, the daughters of the house staged a production of Cinderella for members of the staff and local families.
This kind of contact between the classes was common but relations between landlords and tenants were forever uncertain. The latter were, at best, benevolent despots and the insecurity of their position could never be ignored. Within the space of just a few years, the same family could be feted by those who lived on their estates and then threatened with rebellion. At Lissadell, for example, Sir Robert Gore-Booth mortgaged his property in order to feed everyone in the district and his efforts were no doubt much appreciated. But within 20 years, the house and its occupants were threatened by a possible Fenian rising.
An unresolvable ambivalence about loyalties meant that country house owners could never be at one with their tenantry but remained forever outsiders even if, like the fourth Earl of Dunraven, they proclaimed "I am an Irishman bred and born."
This confusion could also affect the tenantry, so that houses were spared the torch for the oddest of reasons. In 1798, despite their popularity in the locality, the Edgeworths were obliged to flee to Longford town after news came of a French landing in Mayo. But when they returned, the family home was untouched because before the rising their English housekeeper had lent a small sum of money to one of the rebels, a tenant farmer. As a result, he had stood guard over the building, insisting that "not a twig should be touched, nor a leaf harmed".