Mysterious majesty
Lough Cutra Castle, Co Galway The home of the Gwyn-jones family A romantic castle designed by John Nash and remodelled in the 19th century is enjoying a new lease of life. Judith Hill explores the history of the building
Judith Hill explores John Nash’s romantic Lough Cutra, Co Galway
Set above a lake in a rocky landscape, the Regency castle is a Picturesque ideal
In the early 19th century, Ireland was considered to be the locus classicus for Picturesque castles. ‘This bold and harsh, but splendid species of design is well adapted to the recluse parts of Ireland, where nature reigns in wild and mysterious majesty,’ wrote James norris Brewer in The
Beauties of Ireland (1825). Set above a lake in a rocky landscape between the Burren hills and the Slieve Aughty mountains, the Regency castle of Lough Cutra is a picturesque ideal (Fig 1).
The townland of Loughcooter lay on the main route between the provinces of Munster and Connacht, controlled in the Middle Ages by the O’shaughnessy family, who built castles (now in ruins) on two of the islands at the north end of the lake. In 1697, William O’shaughnessy’s land and castle (by then in the town of Gort) were granted to Sir Thomas Prendergast as a reward for disclosing a plot against William III in which he had formerly played a part.
Prendergast’s Galway estates were inherited in 1760 by John Smyth, an Oxford-educated member of a prominent Limerick family, who added Prendergast to his name. Prendergastsmyth saw that, with the lake, Loughcooter had the makings of a naturalised landscape in the manner of Capability Brown.
To this he added extensive plantations and commissioned the English architect James Lewis to design a casino composed of two bow-ended rooms divided by an oval staircase. It was surmounted by a domed roof and fronted by a Doric portico. The drawings were included in Lewis’s volume of designs published in 1797, but the casino was never built.
Prendergast-smyth was raised to the peerage in 1810. His intended heir was named as his 42-year-old nephew, Charles Vereker, to whom, at that time, Prendergast-smyth gave part of his estate: the lands at Loughcooter.
Like Prendergast-smyth, Vereker belonged to a family with a strong political base in Limerick. Unlike his uncle, Vereker did not go to university. He went to sea at 14 and had bought a commission in the army by the age of 17. Eight years later, he had left the army and was a commander in the Limerick Militia.
In September 1798, the militia was stationed in Mayo and encountered a French army detachment under Gen Humbert that
Of Nash’s varieties of Gothic, Vereker was looking for Elizabethan “house gothic”
had landed in Killala Bay in support of the insurrection led by the United Irishmen. Although Vereker retreated after a two-hour fight, Humbert did not attack Sligo and Vereker gained a reputation for bravery.
From an insurrectionist point of view, Vereker’s action was anti-irish, but he regarded himself as a defender of Ireland and, as an MP in the Irish parliament, he voted against the Union. However, like many of the so-called patriotic elite, he accommodated himself to the new status quo and, from 1802 until the death of his uncle in 1817, when he succeeded as 2nd Viscount Gort, Vereker sat in the Westminster parliament.
It was perhaps through a fellow MP, James Stewart, that Vereker met John Nash, as, not long after the Union, Nash designed Killymoon Castle, Stewart’s seat in Co Tyrone. By 1810, Nash had aquired a reputation as an architect of pleasing modern castles that suggested historical seriousness with substantial, irregularly positioned towers and robust battlements, yet provided contemporary comfort with compact, relatively formal plans incorporating rooms with ample windows that addressed large views.
Some of Nash’s castles, such as Luscombe in Devon and Killymoon, were completed by 1810, and several, including two in Ireland, were being constructed. The architect’s own house, East Cowes Castle on the Isle of Wight, begun in 1798 as a modest two-storey block and round staircase tower, was a work in progress for many years; it was substantially enlarged in about 1808–1810, when the octagonal tower was built.
Nash welcomed visitors, who were given a tour and shown drawings of his other projects. Vereker is reputed to have visited East Cowes, probably shortly after the additions were completed in 1810, and he requested something similar for Loughcooter.
If this was the brief, Nash seems to have interpreted it to mean that, of the varieties of Gothic he offered—outlined in a letter to another client, they included Elizabethan ‘house gothic’, collegiate gothic, monastic gothic, cathedral gothic and the ‘Norman or Saxon castle’—vereker was looking for Elizabethan ‘house gothic’. In the same letter, Nash asked his client the names of rooms he wanted, their sizes and even their shapes.
Apart from indicating that Nash needed to assess the extent of the commission, these requests also reveal his willingness to respond to the client’s desires, an approach that was made possible by the inherent flexibility of Nash’s castle architecture. Octagonal, round and square towers implied rooms in a variety of shapes on-plan and the asymmetry of his completed buildings allowed Nash to accommodate this variety in balanced designs.
Vereker requested a relatively small house with a proportionately large number of towers in a variety of shapes. Nash produced drawings in October 1811, some of which survive at Lough Cutra.
There was some similarity to East Cowes Castle in the completed building (which has subsequently been enlarged), most notably in the round tower containing the main stair. Planned with parallel ranges, however, Lough Cutra was closer to the designs Nash was developing at the time for Ravensworth in Durham and Shanbally in Co Tipperary.
There is a sequence of entrance spaces progressing from an open porch to a small, toplit vestibule. This latter opens out to a gallery on the horizontal axis, at one end of which
is the stair (Fig 2). The main reception rooms lie in a parallel sequence: a central drawing room flanked by small ante rooms, the one on the left leading to the octagonal saloon (Fig 5) and the other to the dining room with a canted bay (Fig 3). These rooms open onto a terrace overlooking the lake.
There is a small octagonal room to the right of the entrance porch, with a diminutive tower containing the secondary stair. The servants’ quarters were located in two square towers separated from the main block by a single-storey range.
Externally, the building suggested rather than reproduced a fortified late-medieval house. It was constructed in local squared limestone rubble laid in courses and had two distinct faces. Towers and a central chimney (now gone) dominated the entrance façade and the two-storey range, with its large rectangular windows, presided on the lake front.
Inside, like Viscount Lismore at Shanbally, Vereker looked for Gothic detailing that, at Lough Cutra, Nash applied with a light touch. The gallery with its plaster tierceron vault resting on half-octagon corbels is the most atmospherically Gothic room. A variant of this vault appears on the anteroom ceilings.
In the reception rooms, medieval detailing is confined to the cornicing and the plain trefoil-arched detailing on the shutters. For the main staircase, the trefoil-arched balusters are spindly and elegant (Fig 6).
Although Nash’s castles were not intended to be archaeologically accurate, Nash was attuned to medieval detailing. He was a patron
of A. C. Pugin, whose Specimens of Gothic
Architecture, first published in 1821, set a high standard for drawings of medieval details and he possessed books by antiquarians specialising in medieval architecture such as John Britton and John Carter.
The bosses that decorate the gallery and anteroom vaults and the gallery corbels were taken from the well-illustrated Gothic Ornaments in the Cathedral Church of York by Joseph Halfpenny, published in 1795–1800 and listed in Nash’s library catalogue.
Nash entrusted the execution of the castle to his former pupils James and George Pain, who also designed a gate lodge for the Gort entrance, with a square tower and heavily battlemented gates. Vereker died in 1842, just before the onset of the Great Famine.
By 1851, the money expended constructing the castle, offices and gardens, coupled with the 3rd Viscount’s leniency to his tenants during the Famine, had left the estate in considerable debt. The castle and demense were sold in the Encumbered Estates Court to the Sisters of Loretto, who sold it on three years later to Viscount Gough.
Gough, born in Limerick, was a British army commander who had won significant battles in China and India. He was made a field marshal in 1862 and, in 1880, was celebrated as a military hero in an equestrian statue erected in Phoenix Park, Dublin. The Gough family, who owned Lough Cutra from 1854 to 1952, would superimpose Viscount Gough’s Imperial identity on the castle.
Mass and height were added to the servant’s side of the house with a large square block and ungainly clock tower in 1855. Inside, John Gregory Crace, one of the foremost decorators in mid-victorian Britain, was commissioned to decorate the house, incorporating national and family symbols.
The octagonal saloon retains one of Crace’s schemes (Fig 4): a polychromatic stencilled ceiling and a rich green-and-blue blockprinted wallpaper by Cole & Son depicting the Gough coat of arms enriched with the names of the theatres of war in which he had been victorious. Portcullises and Tudor roses, badges used in the painted decoration of the House of Lords, where Crace was employed from 1845, were added to the saloon cornice. These emblems also appear on the highly decorated fireplace in the gallery.
The 3rd Viscount installed a museum to display Gough’s military trophies on the ground floor of a new canted block designed by George Ashlin to project from the servants’ quarters. The battlements on the Pains’ gateway were replaced by cannonballs.
The death of the 3rd Viscount in 1919 coincided with political upheaval in Ireland, when Lough Cutra was vulnerable to attack. However, the house escaped burning and life flowed back when Guy Gough married Margaret Gregory, the daughter-in-law of Lady Gregory, who lived in nearby Coole Park.
The estate became Gort property again in 1952, when it was acquired by the 7th Viscount. In 1961, his young grand-niece, Elizabeth Sidney, became responsible for the castle, which was now in very poor shape because of failed roofs and burst interstitial pipes.
Her brief marriage to antiques dealer Sir Humphry Wakefield meant the renovations from 1966 to 1971 were in the hands of an expert. Sir Humphry sourced the best local and international talent for an exemplary programme in which original material was reused wherever possible and existing design was employed as the model for repairs.
The Wakefields demolished the museum wing and salvaged the pitch pine to restore windows in the rest of the castle. Plaster vaults, timber framing and cornicing were repaired and the stair was dismantled, fixed and put back together. Cole & Son’s archive retained the designs for the wallpaper in the octagon room, fresh sheets of which were used to re-paper the interior.
In 1971, the castle was acquired by Timothy Gwyn-jones. His wife has now renovated the kitchen and servants’ quarters as her home and Nash’s castle is the setting for weddings and family gatherings that are perfectly accommodated in this well-orchestrated house addressing the tranquil lake that effortlessly belies the upheavals of the past.