Beaulieu House in Drogheda is a special house inhabited by special people. After all how many female championship racing drivers have there been? It's just part of the grand house's strong female heritage, writes SUSAN McKAY.
VISITING A GREAT Irish house is as much about imagining the centuries of living that have happened there, as it is about the appreciation of beauty. Add top-class chamber music to the experience, and you might even feel that you've stepped into the pages of a romantic novel.
Beaulieu House, near Drogheda in Co Louth, is an ideal setting for French musicians Renaud and Gautier Capucon, on violin and cello respectively, when they perform a programme of Schulhoff, Ravel and Kodaly on Sunday, June 8th, as part of IIB Bank Music in Great Irish Houses Festival. But the music is only part of the experience. Visitors to this extraordinary house and garden will doubtless wonder about the equally extraordinary people who live there.
There are stables in the yard at Beaulieu House, but also classic cars, their elegant noses poking out from old stone doorways onto a square where geese waddle. The owner, Gabriel Montgomery de Freitas, used to be a championship racing driver, who drove for Ireland.
She won her first race with a Hillman Imp in 1966, and shared a Lotus Elan with her first husband, Mark Konig, in the 1960s. She raced all over Europe, the West Indies and South America, where she met her second husband, Philip de Freitas.
"I raced very seriously," she says. She was starry eyed at first about the male drivers dominating the profession. "I thought when I started, 'they are all gods', but then I realised most of them weren't very good," she says.
She was one of the few women who entered that particular elite. "Very few women have the right mentality," she says. "It's a very single, focused approach, very cold and calculating.
"Formula One cars can do 200 miles an hour, but when you are in the car, it happens in slow motion. It's a game of chess in cars, a mental thing." She laughs. "I always knew the house would come to me and I'd have to come back." In 2005, she inherited Beaulieu House (pronounced Bewley) when her mother died, so she and her partner, Malcolm Clark, returned to live there.
"Actually, the house has come through quite a lot of women since it was built, so the names have changed, but it has stayed in the family. We've been here since 1650." De Freitas is a 10th-generation descendant of Sir Henry Tichbourne, who had the lands and the original Jacobean house confirmed to him by Charles the second after the civil war in 1641.
The present house, one of the earliest unfortified big houses in Ireland, was completed in 1723. Its great hall is dominated by a massive pair of antlers from a prehistoric Irish elk, though there are also full height portraits of King William of Orange and Queen Mary. King Billy is on a brown horse, not the white one so loved by his followers in the North.
Beaulieu's magnificent gardens run down to the River Boyne and were designed by the Dutch artist Van de Hagen, with herbaceous borders developed by De Freitas's mother. Outside the small parish church in the grounds, there's a fascinating "cadaver stone".
"It is thought to date back to the middle ages, plague times. It shows the half rotted body of a child," says de Freitas. Two lakes in the grounds were dug by the local poor during the famine years.
The house is open for guided tours from May to September and you can hire some of its grand rooms for private functions, for which de Freitas does the catering. "It is tiring, but it is our business and we love running it," she says.
The IIB Bank Music in Great Irish Houses Festival takes place from June 6th to 14th.
For information see www.musicgreatirishhouses.com/programme. The Beaulieu House concert will take place on Sunday, June 8th at 3pm, with an invitation to meet the musicians at 2pm.