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To the manor born

Harry Mount

Wednesday, 11th July 2007

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

Further down the coast towards Cork is Bantry House, spectacularly sited above the Bay of Bantry with stirring views across the water to the snow-capped Caha mountains. Here again, the Anglo-Irish have manfully stayed on, with the crack trombonist Egerton Shelswell-White and his wife Brigitte holding the fort. In 1946 his family were the first to open a country house regularly to the public. Bantry is more bed and breakfast than super-deluxe, but still the call of the American tourist has got through. A warm, comfortable but small bedroom gives on to a small bathroom with underfloor heating. The bedroom looked over the splendid gardens, an amphitheatre behind the house cascading down into an elaborate parterre, inspired by Florence’s Boboli gardens.

The diffident Mr Shelswell-White is on hand at the heaving breakfast sidetable and when you want to go round the house, he is there. Melancholy trombone music fills the hall as you pick up your laminated room guides from him.

Several of the house’s gems are gone — a pair of Guardis, once nailed to the drawing-room ceiling, went for a song in the late 1950s — but some remain: Aubusson tapestries made for Marie Antoinette, pictures of George III and Queen Charlotte, given by a grateful monarch after a White ancestor kept a French armada from invading Ireland in 1797.

As the night draws in, Mr S-W rushes to the phone to book you dinner in the town's best seafood restaurant — O’Connor’s, The Square, Bantry (00 353 27 50221). Before driving down there, take a glimpse at the western evening light draining from the bay in the direction of New York.