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Monday 7 July 2008

To the manor born

To the manor born

Harry Mount visits the grand houses of Ireland’s Georgian past

On top of the luxury comes the history and, boy, there’s a lot of it at Glin. The Knights of Glin have been here since the 13th century. Desmond Fitzgerald, the current and 29th knight, says that staying power has been the Fitzgeralds’ only real talent. While most of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy returned to England after Irish independence in 1921, the Fitzgeralds clung on. They never had much money, and their estate was cut back by the 1903 Wyndham Act to the demesne around the castle.

But what the last three generations of Fitzgeralds have had pumping through their veins — as well as that staying power — is an artistic, architectural, gardening gene. The knight’s mother, Veronica (nickname, the Knight-mère), was a noted gardener and flower painter. The knight, president of the Irish Georgian Society, has fought to protect Ireland’s great houses and gardens for half a century. His wife — Madam Fitzgerald — has written the country’s definitive gardening book, Irish Gardens, and his daughter, Catherine Fitzgerald, is a leading garden expert.

Guests have the run of this treasure-house and its gardens, stuffed to the gills with the fruits of the knight’s self-confessed collecting mania. His first find, a headless statue of Andromeda, presides over a small temple in the walled garden that also provides honey, chickens, sea kale, asparagus, artichokes, espaliered pears, figs, fennel and potatoes for the Jacobeanesque dining-room table.

In the lee of the castle is the main garden, where a formal layout of bay trees and yews gives way to a wilder spread of Tresco daffodils, gunneras and magnolias campbelli and delavayi, all warmed up by the Gulf stream. A little hermitage and a faux-ancient stone circle complete the picture.

Inside the house — mostly 1790s Adam and Wyatt-inspired rococo — is an early find by the knight when he was 12: a drawing-room chimneypiece by Cheere saved from neighbouring Tervoe before it was demolished. Every corner of the castle’s walls, ceilings and floors has something of interest or beauty, whether it’s the delicate 1780s plasterwork in the hall by an unknown hand, the house’s unique flying staircase, or the 1911 Oswald Birley portrait of Priscilla, Countess Annesley.

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