Sligo’s big houses reach wide audience via Financial Times
LISSADELL House and Coopershill House reached an international audicence at the weekend via the pages of the Financial Times.
‘Ghosts and the Big House: rediscovering a lost world in Ireland’ by Jamie Reid appeared in the How To Spend It supplement on Saturday. It remarked on several of the homes of Anglo-Irish gentry from a bygone era.
The article begins with an overview of the homes of these families and their complicated histories in which some view them as beautiful and important landmarks of Ireland’s history, while others see them as little more than symbols of colonial oppresion.
“Families such as the GoreBooths were part of the Protestant Ascendancy, the landowning minority who had been the dominant class in Ireland since the 17th century,” it reads.
“Most were Unionists opposed to Home Rule, and as the struggle for independence intensified, their houses were increasingly seen by Nationalists as oppressive symbols of Ireland’s colonial past.
“This faux charmed world of the Big Houses and their inhabitants fascinated novelists and poets, who depicted it as a blend of comedy, satire, drama and Chekhovian melancholy.
“William Trevor has explored the genre many times, notably in Fools of Fortune (1983). JG Farrell portrayed a once grand but crumbling Anglo-Irish hotel as a metaphor for the fate of the British Empire in his brilliant 1970 novel, Troubles. “Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane, who both grew up in the early 20th century, channelled the experience of trying to hang on to ‘a jolly but doomed’ way of life, as Keane put it, into their books. “And only last year, the Booker Prize-winning author John Banville used a fictional Big House as the setting for his 1950s literary thriller Snow.
“Some of the houses that inspired these stories are long gone, but, like Lissadell, those that survive – whether as private homes, hotels or both – are fascinating places to visit and explore.” The piece begins by deliving straight into the history of Lissadell House and the inspiration it and its inhabitants had on a certain poet.
“It was WB Yeats who made Lissadell famous. A Greek Revival-style limestone mansion built in the 1830s for Sir Robert GoreBooth, it stands in a 400-acre estate overlooking the Atlantic Ocean about nine miles from Sligo on Ireland’s north-west coast. Yeats was first invited to stay in 1894, and while the exterior of the house was forbidding, he found the interior ‘exceedingly impressive’, especially ‘a great sitting room as high as a church’.
“The poet was captivated by two of the Gore-Booth sisters, Constance and Eva, who became good friends and inspired one of his most haunting poems, ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz’ (1933): The light of evening, Lissadell, Great windows open to the south, Two girls in silk kimonos, both Beautiful, one a gazelle.” The piece goes onto remark on the concerts that have since been held there and the restoration of the windows that was undertaken, while also ensuring the initials Constance Markievicz scratched in the window as a child remain visible.
The opportunity was also taken to remark on Coopershill in Riverstown.
It reads: “Coopershill, 13 miles south of Sligo, was built in 1774 for the Cooper-O’Hara family; their descendants still live on the 500-acre estate while running the house as a small but luxurious hotel.
“It’s reached by a mile-long avenue trailing through parkland with a deer herd grazing in the woods. The front door is said to be the tallest in Sligo, designed to suit its 18th-century owner Arthur Cooper, who liked to ride his horse into the hall at the end of a day’s hunting.
“Venison is often on the menu and most of the ingredients will have travelled no further than 200m from the estate farm or garden to the plate.”
The feature on Ireland’s big houses can be read at www.ft.com.