Rescuing an Irish gem

This large and splendid book is more in the nature of a grand illustrated guidebook than a historical monograph. Hundreds of
photographs cover every aspect of Abbeyleix today, the magnificent Georgian house 60 miles south-west of Dublin — its contents, the garden and demesne, not to mention the owner’s family and friends. It makes a fascinating insight into the revival of the Irish country house in recent decades, as bankers, lawyers and entrepreneurs have taken on Irish estates and shaken them out of their 20th-
century slumberous (or violent) decline.

William Laffan has produced a well written overview of one of the more spectacular contemporary resurrections. Abbeyleix is of a considerable interest in its own right, as the work of James Wyatt, while the romantic wooded demesne, with carpets of bluebells, is a survival of the ancient forest which once covered the flat Irish midlands.

Occupying the site of a medieval monastery, Abbeyleix was a characteristic achievement of an Anglo-Irish Ascendancy family in Ireland’s golden period in the second half of the 18th century — the Age of Grattan. When it was created, the wars and horrors of the 17th century were well behind; the country enjoyed a degree of self-rule, with its own parliament in Dublin, a well-educated, entrepreneurial and cultivated (Protestant) ruling class; the beginnings of modern commercial development — canals, mills, harbours and a growing textile industry — and even, in the 1770s, the first stages of Catholic emancipation for the mass of the population.

This civilised equilibrium was not to last. It was too shallow-rooted. The French-inspired rebellion of 1798, the Act of Union, the absence of coal and iron and the reliance on the increasingly diseased potato crop snuffed it all out. But for 30 years there was a cultural and economic boom, and the new Anglo-Irish ruling class was prosperous and optimistic.