Everyone should have a lost Eden from their childhood and mine was Bective House where my grandfather Tom Lavin, followed in a similar capacity by my father William Walsh, was estate manager for its one-time owners, the Birds of Massachusetts, writes Caroline Walsh, Literary Editor
To a child's eye the Bective Avenue, arched by mature beech trees, was as long as infinity. Bunnies and squirrels darted through the undergrowth while the Claddy, alive with wild yellow irises, flowed down to its destination, the Boyne.
In the ruined Claddy graveyard the dead slept on, their names virtually indecipherable on their tombstones. Next came the elephant tree, so called because of its trunk-like branches that generations of children climbed - before tumbling onto the blanket of leaves below. Then , past the bend and the banks of wild garlic and bluebells, came the carpet of daffodils in early spring; yellow and white, double headed and narcissi : they must be in bloom now. Nearer the house a laurel hedge bordered the avenue and beyond came the kennels, stables - and the indoor riding arena .
"A plain two-storey house of ca. 1790" with a good staircase hall is how Bective, designed by Bolton, is described by Mark Bence-Jones in Burke's Guide to Country Houses. But George Briscoe, who later ran the estate, rightly says in his recently published autobiography The Best of Times: Memoirs of a Countryman that one of Bolton's chief legacies was his tree planting and the creation of woodland walks on the demesne. Some of these may now be overgrown but the irreplaceable thing about an old estate like this is that the lie of these paths is there still. With time and resources, they can be brought to life again.
The Birds bought Bective in the early 1920s from its Welsh owners the Sterns, who were unsettled by the Civil War. With two friends, Charlie Bird put in a bid of £3,000 only to be amazed when a telegram arrived in the States saying "Congratulations ,you own Bective". When the friends sold their shares, the Birds owned the place outright. Their era is vividly evoked in a book called A New Englander by Ellinor Stewart Heiser who stayed there in 1937, arriving down the avenue past midnight after their steamer was delayed docking in Dublin only to find the house ablaze with lights, glowing coal fires in every room and roses everywhere.
"I shall never forget the roses that Autumn at Bective. In my bedroom , alone, there were usually half a dozen vases of them of the most beautiful varieties and deepest fragrance and though many a frost covered Bective before our departure, they bloomed on valiantly in the high walled garden."
Evoked here also is one of the estate's most famous horses, Heartbreak Hill, that came sixth in the 1932 Grand National at Aintree and won steeplechases all over Ireland.
There are literary associations too. Bective was the childhood home of the writer James Stern and Mary Lavin lived here as a girl and young married woman.
A lot of families have owned Bective over the last century: Watsons, Sterns, Birds, Wachmans and Wymes. Are another family destined to live out their lives here? If the aspiration to reopen the Navan railway line materialises they could be commuting from the enclosed calm of Bective to the heart of the city - all within half an hour.
