SIMON HEFFER HINTERLAND

Pevsner’s latest guide offers an irresistible taste of Ireland’s architectural stew

The extension of the Pevsner Buildings of England format into Ireland began more than 30 years ago, and proceeds slowly. The latest volume – Central Leinster (Yale University Press, £45) – covers three counties, Kildare, Laois and Offaly, all on the western borderlands of the medieval English pale of settlement.

For reasons as diverse as Ireland’s troubled history, too many of the area’s notable buildings have either been destroyed or damaged: Andrew Tierney, author of this excellent volume, notes that the country’s “fast-changing moral and cultural outlook” has meant the abandonment of some institutions connected with the Roman Catholic church, and the economic crash that hit Ireland so hard in 2008 has led to dereliction and vandalism. However, thanks not least to the belated emergence of a heritage movement, the “savage” rate of attrition in the 20th century has slowed down.

Leinster was easily reached by immigrants and invaders, and it has many Anglo-Norman buildings, almost a millennium old, to show for it. Offaly, though, can trump it with Mesolithic remains from 7,000 BC, stone crosses from the ninth and 10th centuries; and tall round towers at Timahoe and Clonmacnoise from the 12th century.

The Anglo-Norman ruins can be spectacular, such as the Rock of Dunamase, near Portlaoise, a castle built in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. Its barbican gate, hall and curtain walls survive in various states of dilapidation; much of the damage was done in Ireland’s turbulent

17th century.

Not all antiquity is in ruins. The Cathedral of St Brigid at Kildare dates from the early 13th century, though was over-restored by George Edmund Street – who built the Law Courts in London – in the last decades of the

19th. Leixlip Castle has been inhabited for 800 years. It has been expanded and much restored by Desmond Guinness, founder of the Irish Georgian Society, who bought it in 1958. Even more spectacular is Kilkea Castle, seat of the Earls of Ormond, then the Earls of Kildare, then the Dukes of Leinster, who lived there from 1849 – when they had it remodelled – until selling it in 1958. What Tierney calls the “Victorian intrusions” of the restorer, W D Butler, hardly detract from the magnificence of the spectacle.

Despite the predations of the Irish civil war almost a century ago – when the great houses of the Ascendancy came under attack – central Leinster has its share of Georgian piles. Gloster is a remarkable survival, dating from 1720. In 1958 it was sold to a religious order and knocked about; after returning to private hands in 2001, it was restored, leaving it now in better shape than it has ever been: its entrance hall is spectacular.

Even grander is Castletown House, near Dublin, built by the wealthy William Conolly in the 1720s; as the guide points out, the decline in the family’s fortunes in the 19th century prevented a crass Victorian restoration. It, too, was rescued by Desmond Guinness and is now run by the Irish state; many of its contents, dispersed more than 50 years ago, have found their way back. The house was designed by the Italian Alessandro Galilei, his plans executed by Edward Lovett Pearce, a cousin of Vanbrugh. It has remarkable interiors, as does Emo

Court, begun in 1791 for the 1st Earl of Portarlington and designed by James Gandon, a prolific Dublin architect.

Many of the towns of these counties have well-preserved Georgian streetscapes, such as in Durrow and Mountmellick, and Georgian and 19th-century churches abound. There are striking modern buildings too, such as the council offices at Naas, by Heneghan Peng, where each glass wing is askew from another. What the new Pevsner guide proves is that this part of Ireland, between much-lauded Dublin and the heavily-visited west, has endless architectural treasures of its own that repay discovery.