Windows into our grand past

Ireland is dotted with crumbling mansions – hundreds of them, probably, abandoned so long ago that it's not even clear who owns them. For one photographer, chronicling them was a way to record our history – and to connect with his roots, writes GEMMA TIPTON

AT THE CURVE of a west Cork road it is the gate lodge that provides the clue: derelict itself, it nevertheless holds the promise of more to come. As I walk up a tree-lined avenue overgrown with mosses and rhododendrons a rabbit hops ahead, and late-evening sunlight filters through the green woodiness. It’s a little eerie. At a certain point you can just see a chimney stack until, cutting up through blackberry bushes, nettles and undergrowth, the ruins of Kincraigie stand in a clearing. “What do you think?” asks Tarquin Blake.

Blake is fascinated, some would say obsessed, by the ruined houses of Ireland. Although his day job is as a software engineer, he has devoted his spare time for the past number of years to discovering and photographing the ruins of Ireland’s great houses. The results of this passion are now bound in a book, The Abandoned Mansions of Ireland, in which 50 of these relics are depicted in both atmospheric black and white and splendidly mossed and ivyed colour.

The ruins give clues to the history of each house: at Kincraigie a rotting blind still flapping at a glassless window frame, and piles of wood collapsed to ground level, tell that this was not one of the houses burned out by the IRA in the 1920s. Specimens of exotic trees surviving within the ruined walls of the gardens also demonstrate the wealth and ambition of former owners. Blake’s book tells stories about them; he gleaned the information from censuses, other books and oral histories of the area.

Kincraigie was lived in by the Leslie family, relatives of the Leslies of Castle Leslie, in Co Monaghan; one of the Kincraigie Leslies is said to have brought a Pekinese dog belonging to the empress of China back from the Opium Wars as a present for his mother, to live out its days in west Cork.

At Castlegrove House in Co Galway the roofless interior of the former Palladian mansion is now forested with trees. The text tells of Edward Blake, who was “by all accounts a gentleman except in the area of morality”. He “could whip a fly off his horse’s nose at the full length of his whip without his horse being in the least disturbed”. Once, annoyed by the noise of traffic from a nearby road, he had his men build a new road farther away. When this was completed he simply blocked off the old one, and had the traffic redirected, until the former route was just a memory.

That Edward Blake of Castlegrove and Tarqin Blake share a surname is no coincidence. His forebears the Blakes once owned a number of mansions around Galway. Many were sold off after the Land Acts, or saw their lands sold off so that no income remained to support the costs of running such vast places. Blake himself grew up in a big house in England, though that was sold in his childhood, his parents moving the family to something smaller. Alongside his love of photography, it was memories of this, and discoveries about his own history, that ignited an interest in finding out more about these unsung gems.

His agenda is not, however, to rally people around a cause or to campaign for the preservation or rebuilding of the ruins. “Some of them are nicer as ruins, I think,” he says, adding that although he’d “love to buy one” he would maybe “leave it as a ruin and build something modern in the grounds”.

Those who have bought great houses have found them a mixed blessing. Despite the buildings’ having a history of continuous change – addition, demolition and rebuilding, according to fashion, finances and taste – today’s owners are hugely constrained when it comes to renovation and restoration, as Michael Flatley learned when he bought Castlehyde, in Co Cork. And Constance Cassidy and Edward Walsh discovered that, even though the State had turned its nose up at it, they weren’t to be universally applauded for taking on Lissadell.

This ambivalence about both the past and future of the great houses is not new. The term “preservation by record” has been in official use since the 1920s, when, as Mairéad Carew describes it in a paper for the Journal of Irish Archaeology, “those houses selected for preservation by record were described, measured and destroyed”. One of these was Lady Gregory’s Coole Park, which was demolished in 1941, after having been sold to the department of lands. In a memo, dated 1946, the chairman of the board of works declared: “It may be that the house at Coole should have been preserved for architectural or other reasons, but it will have been noted that the arguments made were based on Lady Gregory’s connection with the literary and theatre movement. No one is going to deny Lady Gregory’s claim to a place of honour in Anglo-Irish literature, but it is straining it somewhat to suggest that her home should be preserved as a national monument on that account.”

It can be hard to discover who now owns many of the ruins in this book, and there is the issue of trespass to be tackled when talking to Blake about his researches. Foraying far and wide, he often camped out close to his discoveries. “There are places I have been to where no one has been for 50 years,” he says, adding, “I was only chased off once.” (A note at the front of the book reminds people that “ruins are hazardous” and that “permission would be required from the owner before visiting”.)

Blake’s trespasses should be forgiven, as he has given us a stunning insight into a hidden Ireland. On his website, abandoned ireland.com, he encourages people with information about these wonderful ruins to get in touch. The hope is, he says, “that there’ll be enough interest for a book two”. He already has a shortlist, which includes Duckett’s Grove, in Co Carlow, and Woodstock House, in Co Kilkenny, both of which are now in local-authority care.

Blake guesses that Ireland has hundreds of abandoned mansions, many of them casualties of the land acts and of the unrest of the 1920s. There were mixed feelings about what these ruins represented. Carew quotes the Fine Gael TD Eamonn O’Neill, speaking in the 1930s, about “ruins which leave a nasty taste in our mouths, traces of civil conflicts”.

Looking at them now, through the prism of Blake’s elegiac and beautiful book, those conflicts find their place in the story of Ireland as it has changed and developed. It also prompts one to wonder what the abandoned follies of contemporary Ireland, seen sometime in the future, might look like, with grasses growing from chimney pots, roofs long since fallen in, their interiors full of trees. Will modern architecture make such beautiful ruins?

The Abandoned Mansions of Ireland is published by Collins Press, €27.99. An exhibition of photographs from the book is at Cork Vision Centre until November 25th

Houses with history

Buttevant Castle Co Cork. This ruin is said to be haunted by the ghost of a headless soldier. Vast, fortified and all but destroyed.

Carrigmore House Co Cork. Lost in the 19th century through bankruptcy, it changed hands many times thereafter. Photographs now show collapsed floors and beams, a cast-iron bath clinging to an upper wall by its piping.

Montpelier Lodge, aka the Hellfire Club Co Dublin. The motto of the 18th-century Dublin club was “Do as you will”, but after a servant doused in brandy and set on fire clutched at tapestries, the whole building went up in flames, killing many club members in the process.

Hollymount House Co Mayo. All that remains of the former glories of this great mansion are a pile of rubble, part of the vaulted basement kitchen and a collection of pipes laid in a field, which once heated the greenhouses.