Castle Leslie, in Co Monaghan, has a colourful, eccentric history. Gemma Tiptonmeets the descendant who has turned its fortunes around
"Who do you think you are?" As she made her way through seven schools, before leaving for good just shy of her 16th birthday, it was a question that Sammy Leslie was asked more than most, and it used to drive her demented. An undiagnosed dyslexic throughout her school years, and consequently branded a troublemaker, Leslie is one of the finalists in this year's Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year competition. She has been shortlisted for a project that has seen her turn a small tea shop at Castle Leslie, her family home, into a multimillion-euro hotel and club. The operation includes an equestrian centre, cookery school and sensitive development and revitalisation of Glaslough, the Co Monaghan village in which the castle stands.
Those questions of identity beset us all growing up, and as adults, as we try to work out our place in the world. But while many of us are often judged on where we live, and by our accents, few have our characters routinely assessed and then assassinated on the basis of what our ancestors did. "To me it's normal," says Leslie, who can trace her ancestry back to Attila the Hun. "You learn quite early to develop a very thick skin. And sometimes you do - or did - get very negative judgments. But we were always brought up not to judge people, and if people judged you without even meeting you, well, if they carried that sort of baggage, that was their problem."
Leslie remembers many incidents from her youth. She recalls sitting on a bus coming up from Dublin. "We got chatting to someone - as children we were taught to be chatty and friendly - and this man, when he heard we were going to Glaslough, said: 'Oh, you know the Leslies?' And he was going on and on, without knowing who we were. It happened quite a lot, but you'd never say who you were until the end, and then they'd go, 'Oh my God, but you're so nice,' and I'd think, what am I supposed to be like, a three-headed monster? There were a lot of perceptions.
"But we grew up knowing from an early age that that was their judgment and it didn't really mean anything. Going through school with dyslexia, I sort of got a double dose of it. One of the schools was a convent, and one of the nuns was particularly vicious. Basically, any time I struggled it was: 'Do you think you're special because you come from a big house?' "
Leslie's ancestry is both special and colourful, and the Leslies weren't always bashful about making it known. Jonathan Swift summed it up in the 18th century with the lines: "Here I am in Castle Leslie / Rows of books upon the shelves / Written by the Leslies / All about themselves."
The family has included writers, artists, politicians and poets. There was the Leslie who rescued Margaret Queen of Scots from a besieged castle; the one who refused to swear allegiance to Cromwell; the one who fought bitterly against the act of union and who died broken-hearted, along with the Irish Parliament, in 1800. Then there was Lady Constance, who, although she loved her husband, couldn't bear the sight of him eating as he got older. She designed an enormous ornament, which she called a cache mari - a husband hider" - to sit on the dinner table between them. A clatter one day made her ask the butler: "Is it all over with Sir John?" "No, Madam,"she was told. He had merely lost his false teeth in the soup.
Today, Castle Leslie is one of only 30 of Ireland's great estates still in the hands of the original owners, but it has been touch and go. The land acts took much of the acreage away at the turn of the last century, after which most of the compensation money was invested in Russian railway bonds, just in time for the Russian Revolution to cause the family to lose the lot. And when a house is old and finances are tight, the lure of somewhere centrally heated must be strong.
"We shared baths," Leslie says. "And it was once a week. I hated having baths, because you got so bloody cold. Going to the loo in the night, you'd put your coat on and run down the corridor, so by the time you got there you'd have warmed up a bit. And we'd come home to find no electricity, because it had been cut off because there was no money to pay it, or the phone would be off again. And the car! A film crew left a car behind. It was a Triumph 2000, and it just went and went and went, and slowly fell apart. We had bailer twine on the windscreen wipers, coming in through the windows, and we'd pull - left, right, left, right. Being dyslexic, I wasn't very good at it, so there were always arguments, and I'd have to get out and readjust them.
"The privilege here," she continues, "was having the huge amount of open space to hoot round in, and having scruffy hairy ponies who were rescues off the mountain, or bought from all sorts of places, and the fact we were given really open minds."
Leslie is the fifth of six children, from three mothers. "There's so many different people in our family, from so many different backgrounds. So you had all this wonderful conversation around the dinner table, and our big treat was to be allowed to sit up and join in. And if we threw in a comment, it was encouraged. That was the true privilege of growing up in a house like this."
Despite being brought up as separate families, the children are now close. Leslie describes her first meeting with her half-sister Antonia (daughter of Agnes Bernelle, Desmond Leslie's first wife). "The first day I met her was in school. I was late, so I had to go up and sit in the front. So I went up and sat down, and everyone was giggling, and Miss Smith was giving off, and I sat down beside this girl and went, 'How are you?' and she went: 'My name's Tonia Leslie, and I'm your sister.' And I went, 'Well, my name's Sammy Leslie, then, and I'm your sister, too.' And that was how I got to meet her."
The present generation of Leslies is just as interesting as the previous ones. When Desmond Leslie died, in 2001, the whole family was in France at his bedside. "It was the only time all of us six kids have been in the same room with him, because there was always someone away or something."
One of Sammy Leslie's other half-sisters, Wendell, who had come over from the US, did a tarot reading for the youngest sister, Camilla, or Milly. "She was European brand manager for Pepsi then, and Wendell did her tarot and said: 'You can follow the corporate lifestyle, with easy money, or you can follow your heart, and it will be tough but it will come good.' So Milly quit what she was doing and moved to the south of France with Mum and started writing. Someone suggested a screenplay, so she downloaded software off the internet, bought a book, taught herself, and her first screenplay won a prize in the Hamptons. She has just finished shooting it, with Heather Graham in the lead role. It's a romantic comedy called Buy Borrow Steal."
Also on site in Glaslough is Leslie's uncle Jack, who spent five years as a prisoner of war in Germany (he was captured at Dunkirk), who was in the news more recently for spending his 85th birthday clubbing in Ibiza.
"Then there's Sean - he's musical - and Mark, who's an architect and does multimedia. We're going to do a multimedia project here, looking at the history of this place, not just the history of the family but the history of the Border. How the Border affects everybody on both sides, especially when it just suddenly arrives and cuts communities in half."
It was the peace process that really marked the most recent turn in Castle Leslie's fortunes. "The Border was right behind us. There were something like 114 Border crossings, and 96 were closed. The Troubles were going full tilt, and tourism hadn't a hope in hell of coming up this direction. And my father opened the equestrian centre in 1974, because horses were his big love. It was a very brave move. He had to sell it in 1984, and I was able to buy it back in 2004."
Leslie makes that purchase sound easy, but the 20 years between the sale and getting the stable yard back were spent in a variety of jobs - washing dishes, collecting eggs at a chicken farm, breaking in horses, picking fruit, waitressing and cooking - before finally returning, at the age of 24, to open the tea shop in the castle's leaky conservatory. Little by little, she upped the ante - teas became dinners, repairs were made, bedrooms were restored, guests started to stay over, ghost tours were held - and, finally, the castle found its place on the media map when Paul McCartney married Heather Mills there in 2002.
The repurchased hunting lodge is now a hotel, the equestrian centre is one of the best I've visited and, this month, the refurbished (and now centrally heated) castle is opening as a club, which will follow the ethos set out by Sammy Leslie's father when he said: "The greatest sin of a country house is to be narrow-minded, predictable or, even worse . . . dull."
It's hard to imagine anyone feeling dull at Castle Leslie. There's the Eagle's Nest bedroom, with an en-suite bathroom that has its own outdoor terrace; the Red Room, with a gorgeous four- poster bed (W B Yeats slept here) and the oldest bathtub in Ireland (where, presumably, Yeats also took a bath); Norman's Room, with its tales of ghosts and levitating beds; or Desmond's Room, where you can still find evidence of Sammy's father's passion for UFOs. Weddings were causing too much wear and tear to the house. Restoring Castle Leslie as a club is Sammy Leslie's way of preserving it. Annual membership is €3,000 - and it costs €300 per person per night (€500 for non-members), so that makes it a pretty exclusive club.
Recently appointed to the new Irish Heritage Trust, Leslie is passionate about protecting the castle, the estate and the village.
"An estate is a living, breathing, constantly evolving entity, and it has a very symbiotic relationship with the community round it, so we've ended up doing a framework for both the village and the estate. We held public meetings to see where next, where we want the village to go, what we want to protect, where we see it in 20 years' time. That's the way things should be. But the way planning works in Ireland is you have a little red line around your own site, and you have very little responsibility to what's around you."
Believing in guardianship rather than ownership, Leslie has also set up a trust, so that the castle and lands can never be sold. But how does this woman with such a passion for where she was brought up feel about opening her home to strangers? "It's still a house that's built to entertain," she says. "It's built for people. Uncle Jack lives in the Grey Bedroom in the house, and he loves having everyone around; he talks to everyone."
Leslie is driven yet refreshingly grounded. "It doesn't matter how talented you are in life," she says. "There's still someone who's going to be more talented, more beautiful, more hard working, so you have to be relaxed about things. You can't be the 'ultimate' anything. Nobody's better than anyone else, just different."
And it is that way of thinking, coupled with the long idiosyncratic tradition of the Leslies, that makes Castle Leslie, whether it is the club or the hunting lodge, such a fantastic place to stay. u
Castle Leslie, Glaslough, Co Monaghan, 047-88100, www.castleleslie.com. The winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award will be announced next month