A new series of county-based books laments the decline of our rich architectural heritage - and says much about the changing nature of Ireland, writes Gemma Tipton.
You probably know a bit about the great houses, castles, round towers and stone cottages that dot the Irish countryside, but what do you know about the sweat houses of Co Leitrim and the mud houses of Co Westmeath? And what about our art-deco cinemas, horseshoe forges, follies, ice houses, lime kilns, tin churches and exotic gate lodges? You might not know that a spit of land in Co Roscommon houses a deserted medieval town, including a castle, a harbour, two churches and a windmill.
I have been discovering all this, and more, by trawling through a series of books published by the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, part of the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. Taken county by county, the architectural introductions are a record of the buildings we have and, more importantly, the buildings we are in danger of losing.
We have an odd attitude to architecture. There's that ambivalence towards the grandly built heritage of colonial Ireland that led to many of the great Irish houses' being burned down and the destruction of much of Georgian Dublin. It seemed we couldn't be proud of the "good bits" because they were the "Brit bits".
Now we have replaced one form of destruction with another, shaking off our English heritage to adopt the American style of large, shed-type buildings on the outskirts of small towns. A huge Carpetright or drive-through KFC will dwarf the narrow roads as you approach so many once- pretty places. There are also those swathes of identical housing estates forming strangely isolated non-communities in the hinterlands between city and country.
The idea behind the publications is that increasing our familiarity with our built heritage is the first step towards safeguarding it. "There is a growing awareness of what we have in Ireland," says Willie Cumming, senior architect with the inventory. "But if you'd done a snapshot of the major cities of Ireland 15 years ago, and looked again now, there'd be no connection. It's all changed."
In fact, the 14 titles in the series so far lament the destruction. Leafing through the books, the main evidence is the number of ruined shells of formerly great houses. What the books don't show, as they focus on what deserves to be conserved, is the loss of so much space between our buildings, the swathes of countryside now blighted by concrete and steel.
Neither the industrial and retail sheds, however, nor Ireland's modern housing estates feature in the county introductions, which means either that there is nothing worth documenting or that the inventory is waiting a few decades before passing judgment on what we are now adding to our architectural heritage. Contemporary Ireland is reflected by a couple of churches and county halls and a description of the plans to develop Dublin Airport.
Eleanor Flegg, who is researching and writing the Wexford introduction, says: "I was delighted to be allocated Wexford, because the architectural heritage is so varied and much is well cared for. But I feel in general that the 20th-century legacy is very poor and often regrettable. The 21st century, which is not covered by the NIAH, is much more promising."
Taking 1700 as their starting point, the books present an Ireland filled with churches, grand country houses, cottages and interesting miscellanea, and they form an interesting picture of a country that is increasingly difficult to find.
This is a place of open fields, canals and bridges, milestones, stone carvings, dry-stone walls and the cottages of railway workers, lock-keepers and coastguards.
One of the effects of the books is to make you look more closely at the little things you might otherwise ignore - to see the little touches, such as metal hands clasping the sides of gates, lurking gargoyles or Ionic columns carved into bridges.
They also present a picture of a past when there was plenty of wealth, even if it was unequally distributed. You can read about Lord Bagenal's plans for a new Versailles at Bagenalstown, in Co Carlow. Perhaps having a town named after you gives rise to delusions of grandeur. In any case, Bagenal got as far as laying out the village with avenues and boulevards, and building a courthouse, modelled on Versailles, but that's about it.
He wasn't the only one with big ideas. There is the fabulously named Wonderful Barn at Barnhall, in Co Kildare, from 1743, exotically modelled on an Indian rice store, or the Gothic gate lodges, from 1850, at Ballysaggartmore, in Co Waterford, that bankrupted Arthur Kiely-Ussher, with the result that he couldn't afford to complete a house to accompany them. Kiely-Ussher built the lodges for his demanding wife, who wanted a castle grander than the one her sister lived in.
The period that the gate lodges date back to speaks volumes about the kind of man Kiely- Ussher was. After all, these extravagant and ultimately pointless structures were built at the height of the Famine. For a time in the area, Kiely-Ussher's name was used to frighten naughty children.
It is this sort of anecdotal information that the county introductions are short on. They also lack details of what the public can visit and what is private, which is a shame, given that surely part of their rationale is to raise public interest.
What they succeed in doing, however, is giving a glimpse of a society long gone - one in which little houses were built to preserve huge blocks of ice brought down from mountain tops, where the rich built huge and often ornate mausoleums for dead relatives, and where inns on the roads out of cities marked the staging routes on long journeys.
They also point to an Ireland of industry. Mill houses, windmills and limekilns abound, and a section on Portlaw, in Co Waterford, shows that not all of Ireland's wealthy were as despicable as Kiely-Ussher. Portlaw was built by the Malcomsons as a model village for the workers in their cotton mills. The school at Portlaw is from the same year as the pointless Ballysaggartmore gate lodges.
And what about Leitrim's sweat houses? Dating from the beginning of the 18th century, these little round stone buildings, which worked like saunas, were said to cure ailments from headaches to rheumatism and fevers.
"The whole thing", says Cumming, "is to make an awareness of buildings attractive. We have huge arguments about archaeology - for example the current one over the Hill of Tara - but not about buildings."
"The introductions tell the story of a county through its buildings," says Flegg. "These buildings are often the only record of the people who built them, lived in them and worked in them. Only the rich and powerful are recorded in writing; buildings give a broader perspective on the past."
The Waterford introduction, by Jane Fenlon and Hugh Maguire, talks about "buildings as signifiers of the ebb and flow of the county's fortunes", and Cumming adds that although it's called the inventory of architecture, the books are actually "all about the buildings we live in". So will the introductions work to preserve our architecture? Had they been produced 20 years ago, how much might have been saved?
These aren't easy questions to answer. The big sheds that sit on the edges of Ireland's pretty towns gain planning permission as they are employers and drivers of economic development. After all, we seem determined not to live for too much longer without an Ikea. Whether our relative lack of concern for our built heritage is to do with economic greed or a massive post-colonial hangover is difficult to say, but it is hard to imagine future generations wanting to preserve all that much of what we are currently building.
See www.buildingsofireland.ie and www.wordwellbooks.com