Many books have been written about country houses in Ireland, lost or otherwise, but few are quite as witheringly scathing as this one. It might look like a coffee-table book in size, as so many of the others are, but it is certainly not a coffee-table book in content.
Randal MacDonnell pulls no punches, whether his targets are faceless civil servants or dissolute members of the gentry. Indeed, given that he is recognised as the MacDonnell of the Glens, Isla and Kintyre, his book might even be regarded as the final revenge of the Old Irish against their Anglo-Irish usurpers.
The author, whose allegiance is underlined by the rendering of all Irish names in the Gaelic form, reserves his highest contempt for those who profited from the Cromwellian settlement, these "dour Puritans and other unscrupulous adventurers" who had participated in the "legalised theft" of Irish Catholic land.
He describes one of them, Thomas Bushe - younger son of Colonel John "Fire Away Flanagan" Bushe, who had received a grant of 770 acres near Thomastown, in Co Kilkenny - as "a gambler and spendthrift, a typical half-mounted Irish squireen parson", even though he fathered Charles Kendal Bushe, later Lord Chief Justice.
MacDonnell's passion for genealogy is obvious. Nearly every one of 25 family trees is delineated in detail, none more so than that of the Brownes of Castle Mac Garrett, Co Galway, in which there was a seemingly endless succession of Geoffreys and Dominicks - the Hon Garech Browne, kindly laird of Luggala, will have been pleased.
It was the suggestion of Browne, founder of Claddagh Records, that indigenous Irish names should be used throughout the text. Thus, the last High King, Rory O'Conor, is rendered as Ruaidhri Ó Conchobhair, in the modern version of Irish, which is correct - even though it is bound to twist many English tongues.
The Lost Houses of Ireland, which is subtitled "A Chronicle of Great Houses and the Families Who Lived There", is peppered with almost unbelievable stories and amusing anecdotes about the families that owned or occupied these relics of grandeur - none better told than the extraordinary tale of Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh.
Born "horribly deformed" in 1831, "having only six-inch stumps where his legs and arms should have been", Kavanagh nonetheless developed interests and expertise extending to astronomy, chess, archery, painting "and even to Cossack dancing". He also "got himself a job as a dispatch rider in India", after travelling through Russia and Kurdistan.
This truly heroic MacMurchada Caomhánach returned home to become an enthusiastic reforming landlord, even bringing a railway line to Borris, Co Carlow, his family seat. While in India, he once commented that "if the English had said thank-you more often to the Irish, that country would not be in its present plight".
Many among the gentry had a "fondness for the bottle", notably the eighth (and last) Earl of Wicklow, "Billy" Howard. "In his old age, staff at the Gresham Hotel in Dublin would approach him, as he lay slumped in a chair at the end of an evening's entertainment, armed with the bill and the query: 'Would your lordship like to make your mark now?' "
His ancestral castellated mansion, Shelton Abbey, Co Wicklow, was sold to the State in 1951 and is now an open prison, "so open in fact that . . . the authorities have removed the wrought-iron gates from the entrance and demolished them".
More than half of the Morrison-designed house has also gone and the surviving interiors are mostly gutted.
But nothing could equal the sheer bloody-mindedness behind the demolition of Shanbally Castle in 1960. Three years earlier, civil servants in the Land Commission had given instructions to remove the roof and fitments of John Nash's largest work in Ireland. "Then, in a wicked act of destruction, the battlements were hacked down," the author fulminates.
After Erskine Childers had declined to intervene, the lawn trees at Shanbally, which stood near Clogheen, Co Tipperary, were felled and the castle itself razed. Its fine cut stone was salvaged, broken up and "put to practical use" for surfacing roads. What remained of the castle was blown up with the aid of 1,400 sticks of gelignite.
This was an act of revenge, and no mistake. Revenge for what "The Big House" represented in Ireland and in the folk memory of a people for whom, as the Devon Commission noted (though no date is given here), "their pig and their manure heap constitute their only property" - at a time when landlords lived in the lap of luxury, waited upon hand and foot.
SOME of the landlords also had silly social pretensions. Lord Headfort, for example, "decided that being a Taylor was far too plebeian a surname for him to bear and so, like the Smiths and the Frenches [who changed their names to Smyth and ffrench] . . . he added a letter to his name and became Taylour, which spelling has remained to the present day".
The author, being an architectural historian as well as a genealogist, is both observant and succinct in his description of interiors. Thus, the plasterwork in the entrance hall of Borris House - attributed to the Stapleton family of stuccodores - is likened to "whipped cream, with swags, acanthus leaves and displayed eagles in the frieze and the ceiling".
One of the great values of the book is as a pictorial record of the "lost houses" featured, reproducing for the first time in more than 40 years photographs that appeared in the Irish Tatler and Sketch between 1947 and 1961. Some of the houses, such as Borris and Clonalis, are "lost" only to the extent that few of the original photographs survived a disastrous fire.
There wouldn't have been much point in taking contemporary pictures of the barren sites of the houses that were levelled. But the publisher would have done the author, and his readers, a service if it had included new photographs of surviving houses that were demolished in part or had their interiors gutted.
Otherwise, this engagingly eccentric "coffee-table book" could barely be faulted.
Frank McDonald is Environment Editor of The Irish Times and author of three books on Dublin
The Lost Houses of Ireland. By Randal MacDonnell. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 232pp. £25 sterling
