Luggala Lodge was built in Ireland’s Wicklow mountains near the end of the 18th century by Peter La Touche, the son of a French Huguenot banking family. It was only ten miles from his house, Bellevue, and abundant game made it an ideal place to indulge a love of field sports. The late Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, who for years was head of the Irish Georgian Society, wrote of it: ‘Somehow, this whitewashed toy pavilion fits into its green-grey setting of old twisted oak trees, beeches, mossy rocks and mountains in the most unnaturally natural way. It carries off its very unlikelihood with a vivid panache.’
Robert O’Byrne is an architectural historian whose narrative provides insight into the building itself, as well as the early history of the valley. While he details the strong attraction the estate has held for its various owners, he paints the house as the star amid the natural wild beauty of its setting. He has made something of an Edwardian scrapbook with illustrations drawn from a variety of sources: music sheets, watercolours, pages from photograph albums and visitors’ books.
The childhood of the three Guinness girls, Maureen, Aileen and Oonagh, was spent with their governesses at Luggala, remote from their father Ernest and mother Chloe, who lived in the neighbouring valley.
After her marriage to Lord Oranmore and Browne in 1936, Oonagh wrote in her visitors’ book: ‘Luggala has now been given to me by my kind father.’ Twenty years on, she used it for holidays from her life in Paris: two weeks at Easter, a month in August, a few weeks over Christmas. She entertained her guests lavishly in what she called ‘the most decorative honey pot in Ireland’. The painter Lucian Freud often stayed there following his marriage to her niece, Caroline Blackwood. The film director John Huston settled in Ireland for many years after he visited Luggala for the first time:
I saw, across a running stream, a field of marigolds and beyond the field, surprisingly, a white sandy beach bordering a black lake. Above the black lake was a mountain of black rock rising precipitously, and on its crest, like a shawl on a piano, a profusion of purple heather.
Luggala was an oasis of fun in the rather joyless new Irish republic in which I grew up, ruled by President de Valera and the Catholic church. I was invited to dinner the first time in 1960 by Oonagh’s son Garech Browne, who’d already started his revival of traditional Irish music that led to his success with the band, The Chieftains. In the back of the car they sent to fetch me sat the playwright Brendan Behan — an amiable man with the crumpled nose of a boxer. He made our driver stop at a bar, produced a wad of cash, bought drinks all round, and recited poetry with a remarkable recall for a drunk. We reached a simple, carved stone gate after a steady climb into the mountains, then a steep descent on a tarmacked avenue with a vertiginous drop down to the glistening black waters of Lough Tay. On the valley floor the car’s headlamps picked out startled red deer among the vivid green lichen-covered boulders, when out of the darkness appeared a small white stucco building with miniature battlements, like a pop-up castle in a
child’s book.
The butler Patrick Cummins welcomed us frostily since we were late for dinner and, noticing I was a little drunk, thoughtfully provided strong coffee before leading me to my place next to my hostess, a small, blond-haired woman in her late forties. Her shy manner gradually mellowed with constant birdlike sips from a glass of her favourite Dimple Haig whisky. Sensing I was drunk she put me at ease with amusing stories about our fellow diners. She brought the dinner to an end by signalling down the table to Behan, who rose to his feet, sang a ribald song, then flung his arms wide in triumph and fell over backwards.
In a valley set deep in the mountains it was easy to get snowed in for days, which was mostly greeted with cheers from the guests — invitations to stay were in demand, as Oonagh’s parties were by now legendary. One Christmas an alarmist group imagined food was going to run out, and started in the early morning digging a path up the drive, a pointless exercise in a continuing snowstorm. Through the blizzard, with his monocle frosted opaque and a clipped Bengal Lancer moustache forming tiny icicles, appeared Lord Dunsany — he was invited for lunch and nothing was going to stop him.
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