Local authority in last-minute rescue of historic house

Emergency partial repair of one of Cork’s most significant old houses was driven by local concerns

One of suburban Cork’s most important heritage properties, Vernon Mount House in Grange, may not yet have been restored, but it has been rescued.

In a statement issued last month, Cork county manager Martin Riordan confirmed that, having become increasingly concerned with the property’s deteriorating condition, the local authority had used its powers under the planning acts to carry out essential repairs to the roof of the building.

In late 2011, its owners were registered as directors of Vernonmount House Restoration Ltd, whose representative in Cork is Olaf Maxwell, one of the directors of the company, which was previously listed as VM Development Co.

Although some roof repairs had been done by the owners in 2007, there were substantial sections where effective patching was no longer possible and more comprehensive repairs were needed.

Vernon Mount is a unique Georgian villa of national significance whose quality is enhanced by the presence of exceptional neo-classical paintings by Nathaniel Grogan, especially one of the very few ceiling paintings on canvas surviving from the late 18th century in Ireland. The curved walls of the atrium at the head of the cantilevered stone staircase are also painted with life-size mythological figures.

Peter Murray, the director of the Crawford Art Gallery, described it last year as “a blistering reproach to Cork’s sense of heritage and civic pride”.

The council approached the owners at the beginning of 2012, initially on an informal basis, and subsequently on a more formal one, according to Riordan

Despite the offer of financial assistance towards costs, these approaches did not produce results. So, assisted by a grant from the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, which was also worried about the house, the council decided to go ahead with repairs.

“In view of the exceptional architectural importance of Vernon Mount, we would have been remiss if we had let this opportunity pass,” said Riordan.

The house was built for Atwell Hayes, father of Sir Henry Browne Hayes, a widowed and prosperous knight at a time when Cork was a very prosperous city, but a grandee with ideas significantly above his means.

In 1797 these drove him to abduct the heiress Mary Pike, a Quaker who was staying with the family of the art collector Cooper Penrose in Montenotte. She was driven across the city to Vernon Mount and forced into a fraudulent marriage, which she always claimed she had resisted strongly.

As all Cork knew of her capture, she was rescued within 24 hours. The prosecution at the eventual trial of Browne Hayes was led by John Philpott Curran, whose daughter Sarah was later also a guest at the home of Cooper Penrose.

The death penalty was commuted and Hayes was transported to New South Wales where he lived comfortably until he was pardoned in 1812. He returned to Cork and died there 20 years later, a year before Mary Pike, described at her death as “a lunatic”.

Although its deliberately Arcadian setting above the city has been eroded, the state of the house has long been the subject of lobbying by the Irish Georgian Society, which culminated in its selection as one of the 100 endangered sites listed by the World Monuments Fund in 2008.

Yet it seems as if the spur to this almost last-minute rescue by the county council was a local community initiative. The Grange Frankfield Partnership, a residents’ group that combines two city suburbs which spread across the county bounds, aims to unite Cork City Council’s plans for a valley park amenity area with the County Council’s undeveloped adjacent acres at Grange and Frankfield.

The combination would produce a large suburban parkland offering something akin to the panorama that once enriched the landscape of Vernon Mount. In the partnership’s proposal, Vernon Mount itself is a core element and their strategy has concentrated on its restoration.

The group, which is chaired by businessman Tony Foy, was recently honoured by the Cork Environmental Forum for its promotion of the integrated city and county proposals. Responding to the decisions of the county manager, it acknowledged that Riordan had completely honoured the commitments he had made to the group in relation to Vernon Mount.

The property had been bought in the 1950s by the Cork and Munster Motor Cycle Club, which developed a motor-cross track in the grounds.

The planning application for a hotel development from its subsequent owners In Pursuit of Leisure (later VM Development) was refused permission by the county council in 1998 and no further application has been made since then.

As several promises of access made to the Grange Frankfield Partnership and others by Olaf Maxwell have not been fulfilled, the internal condition of the house remains uncertain, but while the current works are limited in scope the county manager’s statement tentatively suggests a possible future for Vernon Mount.

So it seems that a building once described as one of the most exquisitely designed houses of 18th century Ireland may be brought back to life as the focus of a community amenity and as a result of community agitation.