Abandoned Ireland by Rebecca Brownlie: evocative history with an eye for telling social detail

Abandoned Ireland

Author: Rebecca Brownlie

ISBN-13: 9781785374326

Publisher: Irish Academic Press

Guideline Price: €27.95

Abandoned Ireland begins its story at Cairndhu, a mansion on the dramatic Antrim coast road north of Larne. Cairndhu is the epitome of abandonment: its windows are bricked up, the once-elegant ironwork of its wide veranda sorry and rusting.

Rebecca Brownlie provides a rapid sketch of the house’s 20th-century history: its beginnings as a property built, rebuilt and rebuilt again by a fussy Scottish industrialist; its final iteration as a complicated Edwardian mansion; and its salad days as a focus of what passed for high society in a narrow, unionist-controlled Northern Ireland (Princess Margaret, who seems to feature in every story of the 20th century, inevitably pops up here too).

These busy years faded with the austerity of war, and the property gradually declined and was sold to the State, which failed to care adequately for the house. And so at last its eventual abandonment, although to these all-too-familiar tropes are added a dash of the unexpected: Ridley Scott used the house as a film set; and Brownlie herself first encountered Cairndhu as a member of a paranormal investigations group. For Cairndhu is, on top of everything else, haunted, although one assumes not by Princess Margaret.

The author is interested above all, one senses, in... the stories and power retained by detritus and everyday objects – the crucifix on the wall, the dusty piano, assorted books, the bottle of cod liver oil

Despite its present condition, however, Cairndhu is not actually lost to the world: the roof remains intact; and the house might yet be pressed again into action. For this is not a book about ruined properties. Brownlie is instead intent on capturing houses – large and small, mansions and cottages, silent railway stations, echoing prisons and empty dance halls, military forts and hotels – which retain a breath of life.

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The text in this book is frequently short on detail: the properties’ locations are seldom pinpointed, one assumes for reasons of security. But these occlusions are more than made up for in a wealth of telling social detail. The author is interested above all, one senses, in the grain of day-to-day life: in the stories and power retained by detritus and everyday objects – the crucifix on the wall, the dusty piano, assorted books, the bottle of cod liver oil – even amid the desolation of abandonment.

And more than anything, Brownlie’s tremendously evocative photographs tell and amplify such stories of materiality, and of buildings poised trembling between life and death.