There is a dark lady in a long dress who glides up the stairs of the old house in Co Derry, hesitates in the shadows on the landing and then is not there any more.
She is, I presume, an ancestress, especially as she manifests herself during telephone calls, a trait that is noticeable in my immediate relations who are always frantic with concern that they may be paying for someone else's long-distance calls.
I am glad a shade of the family is watching over Springhill, for the Conynghams gave the house at Moneymore to the National Trust almost 50 years ago.
"Sweet Springhill", as it is described in a song, is one of the prettiest houses in Ireland, though I say it myself. I hope this is because of the good taste of my forebears but fear it is more probable that they never had the funds to transform it into something more pretentious. There have been alterations and additions but they were mostly carried out in the 18th century and have not spoiled the symmetrical facade. It is essentially the "convenient dwelling house of lime and stone, two storeys high" that William Conyngham built around 1680. The plain, whitewashed front faces down the straight avenue, and is flanked by two barns forming a deep courtyard.
The roof is high and slated with a central dormer window and there are two single-storey wings with bay fronts on each side. The back of the house is a mélange of different angles and looks down a long walk of beech trees that runs to what we called the castle but was more probably a windmill converted into a ruin for romantic effect.
The Conynghams were of Ayrshire origin, arriving in Ulster shortly after the Plantation of James I. They were prominent in Derry and during the siege, James Conyngham, a merchant in the city, created a recipe for a pancake composed of starch and tallow that was pronounced "good for food and also physic".
Mina Lenox-Conyngham, the last chatelaine of Springhill, was the author of An Old Ulster House, a classic of its kind, which was written during her late seventies in the 1940s. It includes many original documents and letters from 1691 onwards and is a fascinating record of the daily lives of the people who lived in Springhill. It has now been republished
by the Ulster Historical Foundation with the addition of many handsome illustrations (see www.booksireland.org.uk).
Mina had a dramatic sense of occasion. She wore wide-brimmed black hats and long velvet clothes; her fingers were adorned with diamond rings. On stormy winter nights she would lean over the smoking-room fire and tell us tales of the supernatural which would have made one's blood run cold, except it was quite cold already as the smoking-room fire gave out smoke rather than heat.
She peopled the house with ghosts. Gentlemen in knee-breeches thronged the staircase; ladies in long, white dresses flitted through the walls; one often heard the clash of steel as an invisible duel was fought and the whiff of gunpowder drifted out of the blue room where a long-ago tragedy had occurred. At night one felt neglected if the closet door did not fly open mysteriously just as one got into bed, or when one awoke, the curtains round the four-poster had not been rearranged.
If one believes in ghosts, it is easy to see the twitching of a branch or something moving among the bushes outside the drawing-room windows. This could be Woodcock Carden, a gentleman who tried to abduct my great-great Aunt Eleanor in the most sensational abduction case in 19th-century Ireland. Carden, a notorious landlord in Tipperary, fell in love with Eleanor. She refused to marry him, so he made arrangements to carry her off. He had horses posted across the country to Galway, where there was a yacht fitted out and ready to sail to Scotland.
The abduction failed because it rained and the aunts were being driven from church in a covered carriage instead of an open landau. Woodcock Carden held up the horses, but though he tried to drag Eleanor out, she gave him "a most tremendous kick". My great-grandmother beat him over the head with her umbrella and the screams of the other ladies attracted the attention of some workmen who came to their rescue. Carden fled but was captured after one of his horses dropped dead of exhaustion. He was tried and imprisoned for two years' hard labour in Clonmel, but after his release he continued to frequent the places where Eleanor was staying, including Springhill, until he was bound over to keep the peace. He retired to Barnane, his estate in Tipperary, and built a Turkish bath.
The interior of Springhill is as charming as the exterior with low, panelled rooms and a broad oak staircase. The original contents are more or less in the same places as in the Conynghams' day - though, alas, the bottle holding great grandpa's pickled appendix is no longer on view.
In 1957, Springhill was given to the National Trust by William Lenox-Conyngham, who signed the final deed just a few days before he died. The house and grounds are now beautifully maintained. No longer need "the loyal tenants come unbidden with carts of gravel" to fill in the potholes in the avenue so that Sir Edward Carson could have a smooth ride to the front door.
At the launch last week of the new edition of Springhill: An Old Ulster House, the place was eerily peopled with ancestors. In reality they were actors in period dress. But somewhere in the house a door slammed and there was an unexplained indignant rustle - signs, I feel sure, of ghosts from the past making a critical assessment of their descendants.