Years ago, in 1980, myself and the late Jeremy Williams had the privilege of being entertained to lunch by artist Derek Hill at his Regency glebe house in the middle of Co Donegal. Given Hill’s larger-than-life persona and fondness for telling amusing stories about the people he knew, it was a very convivial occasion, with good food served up by his cook, Gracie McDermott.
The Southampton-born painter of both portraits and landscapes was preparing to gift to the State the house and 25 acres of beautifully wooded land, which he had bought in 1953 for £1,000 and then filled with his eclectic (and probably priceless) collection of art, antique furniture, books and bric-a-brac – all accumulated during extensive travels throughout Europe and Asia.
During Heritage Week, I was delighted to re-visit Derek Hill’s house to find that it’s still suffused by the spirit of the man himself, even though he’s long since gone, having died in London in July 2000. What makes it even more unique is that everything he collected is still there, including many of his clothes and even his cobra-skin slippers, on the wooden floor beneath his bed.
We couldn’t have had a better guide than Jean Kearney, from nearby Church Hill. She knew Derek well because he moved into a nearby cottage after the old rectory was handed over to the Office of Public Works in 1982. Always curious, he would mischievously join tours of the house from time to time “just to hear what we were telling visitors about him”, as she recalled with a laugh.
All sorts of famous people were guests at St Columb’s, as Hill’s home was known, including Swedish-born actress Greta Garbo, food writer Elizabeth David and violinist Yehudi Menuhin (whose name was garbled as “Hughie McMenamin” by the locals) as well as Erskine Childers and Mary Robinson, whose portraits he painted during their terms of office as president of Ireland.
Garbo used to eat thin slices of apple “that you could almost see through” washed down with “a lot of water”, according to our ever-engaging tour guide, and Hill took the view that “she would have been happier if she ate more”. It’s no wonder that Mary Robinson once upbraided him for being a “terrible name-dropper”, to which he retorted: “That’s what the Queen said too!”.
The guest bathroom has an original Victorian toilet, with its outlet at the front to show off an elaborately decorated ceramic bowl. The kitchen, where Gracie used to down tools to sit in an armchair and listen to Women's Hour on BBC radio, has a painted traditional dresser filled with delftware, and William Morris wallpaper covers the walls and ceiling of Hill's study upstairs.
One of the regular visitors was Henry McElhinney, owner of nearby Glenveagh Castle, whom Hill had met decades earlier in Florence when he was director of the British Council while McElhinney ran the American Academy. I always thought the latter was heir to the Tabasco fortune, but apparently the source of his wealth was rather more prosaic: coin-operated gas meters.
McElhinney and Hill had much in common, not least the fact that they were both gay, which probably explains why their homes in Donegal ended up belonging to all of us. The American didn’t like Hill’s choice of furnishings, rubbishing his Tiffany lamp in the dining room as “vulgar ... it goes with the rest of the house”. But then, Hill was an artist rather than a single-minded collector.
We also went to Glenveagh, which McElhinney furnished with period pieces in the best possible taste, but found it cold compared to St Columb’s.
Not only is Derek Hill’s house much more charming, but its grounds also provide a lovely venue for painting classes, and there were lots of people with paintbrushes and easels working away under trees or in the Glebe Gallery’s courtyard.
It’s the only house I can think of in Ireland with its multifarious contents still intact, as if Hill himself had just gone out for a walk.
The only sad note was that the post office in Church Hill had closed down the previous Friday after being run by successive generations of the Wilkins family for 180 years. Now local people must do their business in the appalling mess that is Letterkenny.