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Dromana House + Gateway Cappoquin Waterford

Two Hours in Aragon

Quite the holiday destination, Blackwater River Valley is a dreamscape of country houses and their demesnes. A celebrated 20th century novelist was a frequent guest at one of these heritage delights, Dromana House, where she became well known for her penchant for gossip and awareness of social standing. The editor of the novelist’s later books, Diana Athill of André Deutsch, heaped praise on her in a 2017 recording: “Molly Keane was so remarkable because she was so lovely and charming and so nice. It was very odd she became a writer because she came from a completely Irish gentry background. She always insisted that she started writing purely because she had to make some sort of money to buy dance dresses and go to parties.”

“She had to write under a pseudonym because if young men had known she wrote books they would have thought she was brainy and that was thought to be the most awful thing. Her first nine books were written under that name so that no one would know. You think she can’t just have written them coldly to make money. She must have been enjoying writing because they are so good. Of course her darling first husband died young and quite unexpectedly. She was absolutely broken by that and she had to somehow cope with bringing up her two children along and managing as best she could.”

“The thing about Molly was she was so completely not conceited about her writing and she did in a way know she wrote well but she didn’t think that important. She was very charming – many people who are charming become corrupted by their own charm. You can’t help knowing it if you are a great charmer and so you exploit your charm. I’ve met charming people who are quite chilling to know because in a way it’s automatic with them to turn it on. Molly could turn it on if she wanted to. I’ve seen her to do it if she was wanting to get through an interview or something. But on the whole she was the most charming person I know who didn’t ever exploit it.”

Barbara Grubb née Villier-Stuart’s parents left Dromana House after most of the estate was acquired by the Irish Land Commission in 1957. In their absence, the residing cousin demolished the “new house” as Barbara’s husband Nicholas calls the later wing. “It’s a good view isn’t it?” asks Barbara with some understatement standing on the balcony accessed through French doors in the drawing room of the remaining house. “That’s Lismore over there – you can see the Catholic cathedral and to the right of it the Protestant cathedral. It’s such a good vantage point here.”

“And then you’re looking further to the right at the Knockmealdown Mountains and two of the main Blackwater Valley houses: Tourin House owned by the Jameson family of whiskey fame and then up the hill you’ve got Cappoquin House where the Keane family lives. Sir Charles Keane gave a presentation here last night on his three times great grandfather Lieutenant General John Keane, Lord Keane of Kandahar.”

“So here we are on the Blackwater, probably one of the widest stretches of the river. As you all know it sources in Kerry and goes 12 miles south of here into the bay in Youghal. There’s a four metre tide so it’s quite a serious one. We have salmon rights here which go back to 1215 to King John. Needless to say there are hardly any salmon left so very little fishing is done. In around 1905 there was just short of a quarter of a million salmon caught in the river which is a massive amount of fish! Now the annual quota is about 2,000. Just shows you what us humans have done.”

“There was supposedly a castle here burnt in 1200. We know nothing of it really. We then know about this towerhouse that was fought over in the 1640 rebellion that left it in a ruinous state. And then after that the family built a Jacobean low house lying east to west. In the 1700s they built on the Georgian block. The garden balustrade is the bow of what was the ballroom. That one room was 22 yards side to side which wasn’t small.”

The “new house” was erected in front of the older building in the 1780s by George Mason-Villiers, 2nd Earl Grandison, and remodelled by Henry Villiers-Stuart, 1st and last Lord Stuart de Decies, to a design by the architect Martin Day in the 1820s. It had a substantial nine bay two storey façade. All 17 windows on this elevation had raised stone surrounds; the eight ground floor window surrounds are surmounted by triangular pediments. The central entrance door (flanked by paired Doric columns and topped by a semicircular fanlight) was set in a larger triangular pedimented surround. Martin Day is mainly known for his severe neoclassical buildings in Counties Waterford and Wexford.

Demolition of the Georgian exposed the 1960s L shaped rear range of the inner courtyard. It was tidied up to achieve a pleasant harled manor house appearance with a cut limestone Gibbsian doorcase. Looks deceive: this is the Jacobean house incorporating the base of the medieval tower. Barbara and Nicholas returned in 1995 and ever since have worked on restoring the house and grounds. “The Georgian building was so vast if it hadn’t been demolished Dromana House would have been sold and would now be a hotel,” warns Barbara. Picturesque ruins of a 1751 banqueting house provide a shoreside folly. Azaleas, camelias, hydrangeas, magnolias and rhododendrons add colour and shape to 12 hectares of woodland gardens.

Barbara is the incredibly dashing 26th generation of the family to occupy the estate over the last eight centuries. Females feature prominently in her genealogy. A painting of her equally glamorous predecessor Lady Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, favoured mistress of Charles II, hangs in the drawing room. Another ancestral portrait is of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute. “He had one of the shortest terms as a Prime Minister of Great Britain,” she ruefully remarks, “although that was until Liz Truss came along.” In 1826, the Irish Nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell visited the enlarged Dromana House as a guest of then owner Lord Henry Mount Stuart.

“Dromana House was the inspiration for the house in Molly Keane’s Two Nights in Aragon,” Barbara shares. Published in 1941, this was her ninth novel and the fate that befalls one of its protagonists, Nan O’Neill, is quite simply the most tragicomic in Anglo Irish literature. “Aragon stood high above a tidal river. So high and so near that there was only a narrow kind of garden between house and water … Directly underneath the house and this grove, the river swelled and shrank with the tides.” Sounds familiar? Barbara confirms that Dromana, like Aragon, is haunted. There’s holiday accommodation in one part of the house: a private reciprocal. Molly Keane lived for a while in Belleville, a country house upstream from Dromana closer to Cappoquin.

“Villierstown is named after the major landowning family of Villiers who founded a linen industry here about 1750,” writes James Hyde in The Super Seven Towns and Villages of West Waterford (2024). “Built to exploit flax growing, Villierstown was a perfect spot: broad fields, easy access to river transport and a large population to work as weavers.” This enterprise was established in response to a weather induced famine of 1739: homes were built for linen workers from Belfast and around 60,000 trees were planted. The village is 2.6 kilometres south of Dromana.

Now disconnected from the grounds of Dromana House stands arguably Ireland’s most extraordinary and certainly most charming gateway. “An Irish Georgian Society (US) Grant,” records Stuart Blakley in the Irish Georgian Society Bulletin (2023), “was awarded to the Indian Gateway of Dromana Estate for a conservation report. This archway flanked by lodges was designed by local architect Martin Day in whimsical mood in the early 19th century. Its Hindu Gothic idiom brings a little bit of Brighton Pavilion to County Waterford.” A public road runs through the arch and over the Finisk River bridge behind it adding to its precarious condition. All minarets and ogee arches, this silvery sandstone structure replaced a timber version built to welcome home newlyweds Henry Villiers Stuart and Theresia Pauline Ott. Their honeymoon location? Brighton, of course. Quite the holiday souvenir.

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Marlfield House Hotel + The Duck Restaurant Gorey Wexford

A Bon Mot Cast in Stone

“Margaret and Laura Bowe inherited good taste from their parents,” states architect Alfred Cochrane. He worked on Marlfield House Hotel over a 15 year period starting in 1982. “Mary their mother has incredible style and she wanted more accommodation. My work at Marlfield is Postmodern. I wanted the Conservatory to be a room away from the house, not directly attached. It’s inspired by Richard Turner’s  Botanic Gardens Belfast and the National Botanic Gardens Dublin glasshouses as well as Brighton Pavilion. The pond front of the single storey wing is designed to resemble a French hunting lodge. I had to insert a fire wall into the Staircase Hall of the original house. The Bowes bought superb 18th century fireplaces like the one in the Library. Great artists were brought on board: Marina Guinness and Victoria Ormesby-Gore created the Print Room and Nat Clements painted the murals in the Entrance Hall. Mary’s husband Ray dammed a stream to create the pond.”

Alfred’s work augments Marlfield’s presence both physically and aesthetically. Creative clients helped. “We’re all mad about design,” declares Laura Bowe. “Our family all have a good eye. I worked in Alfred’s practice for a while.” Mary and Ray bought the house and 15 hectares from the widowed Lady Courtown in 1977. It was built in 1852 by the 4th Earl of Courtown as a dower house. The house is tall, slim and elegant. Three storeys: four bay entrance front; four bay corresponding garden front with a two bay breakfront; and two bay bowed side elevation. The other side adjoins a two storey ancillary wing. Faced with rugged semi coursed rubblestone and red brick quoins. A parapet free pitched roof over deep eaves is punctuated by tall chimneystacks. The 5th Earl swapped some of the ground floor multi pane windows for plate glass sashes in 1866. “Courtown House was across the road,” comments Laura. “It was sold to the Irish Tourist Board in 1948 and pulled down.” Jeremy Williams records in his 1994 guide Architecture In Ireland 1837 to 1921, “Courtown House, the seat of  the Earls of Courtown, was much modified during the 19th century … William Burn was involved in remodelling the house.” The 9th Earl, James Patrick Montagu Winthrop Stopford, recently enjoyed a weekend at Marlfield.

The vivid reinvention of the former dower house, a joyous revivication, begins at the entrance to the grounds. In place of traditional stone pillars are Alfred’s whimsical wrought iron columns supporting wry wiry pineapples. This design is shadowed in a gazebo on the lawn. The entrance portico of the house bridges the gap between Neoclassicism and Postmodernism. There’s a layering of stylistic language at play, apropos for a polyglot architect. A Doric centrepiece steps forward from smooth stone bays; it’s deconstructed to become not so much a broken pediment as a broken temple ‘glued’ together with glazing. Beyond lies the vast semicircular Entrance Hall partly mirrored in plan by a bowed external water feature. A picture gallery connects the Entrance Hall to the State Suites of the single storey wing: the French Room, Georgian Room, Morland Room, Print Room, Sheraton Room and Stopford Room. “Inspiration for the Print Room came from Mariga Guinness’s work at Leixlip Castle and of course Lady Louisa Connolly’s famous Print Room at Castletown,” notes Margaret. “When the doors are pulled across the bed alcove, wedding ceremonies are often performed in this room.”

There are another 13 bedrooms, all with marble bathrooms, upstairs in the main house. Guests can dream and more in coronet, fourposter and half tester beds. The Conservatory on the garden front balances the State Room wing on the entrance front. History, luxury, harmony, geometry and symmetry: all are important at Marlfield, a billet-doux to hospitality. The Conservatory, an adventurous addition, is a tripartite triumph in cast iron and glass. A central projection balloons up to a storey high ogee shaped dome. The vertical frame of distinctive lattice metal pilasters topped by stylised Ionic capitals is as stylish as anything produced in the Regency era. The Ionic order with cerebral associations bestowed upon it by Vitruvius has long carried intellectual heft. Soaneian mirrored cornicing, cills and starburst ceiling roses reflect the omnipresent brilliance.

“I worked with Alfred and his business partner Jeremy Williams in the summer vacations while I was studying architecture,” says Albert Noonan. “I was involved in drawing the magnificent curvilinear Conservatory. Extending a period property is full of design challenges. Alfred tackled these challenges with confidence, building on historic references to create a statement piece that harmonises well with the original building both inside and out. The Conservatory is a joy to walk around and the interior with frescoed walls brings the beautiful gardens into the Dining Room. Stylistically it has not dated and looks as good today as when it was first built.” It reminds us of sitting in the conservatory of Ballyfin, County Laois, or Rokeby Hall, County Louth.

Albert reminisces, “As a young architect I was impressed by the uplifting experience of visiting Alfred’s projects. His designs deliver on functionality but they also incorporate creative details that add a sense of intrigue and visual interest. This approach to design influenced my career – I endeavour to create designs that not only meet clients’ brief of functionality but also create appropriate environments that are uplifting and pleasurable experiences for the end user.”

In a mark of approval, a continuum of tradition, an aligment of the story arc, a refinement of the built form, he would return to Marlfield to design the restoration and conversion of the coach house, potting shed and gardener’s tool shed into The Duck. The hotel and restaurant share the same avenue but then it forks off into different, albeit abutting, worlds. “The Duck is a meeting point for all directions in good or bad weather,” Margaret clarifies. “People come in the summer to sit on the terrace. People come in the winter to be near the fire. It sits 100 for lunch and 120 for dinner.” There’s a rustic feel inside: exposed stone walls and timber panelling. “The beauty of the restaurant is it overlooks the kitchen garden. There’s a kilometre long walk around the meadow. This whole place is in use, all 36 acres.”

Two years later, Albert designed the remodelling of the tiny Gatelodge, transforming it into a spacious two bedroom single storey residence. “It’s extremely popular,” confirms Margaret. “People never stay once.” A pair of simple gate pillars marking the entrance to the Gatelodge garden is repeated in the hedge opposite lining the avenue: that symmetry in action. He recalls, “The original Gatelodge was a classic and modest design and the extended building retains these attributes externally. Internally, we created visual interest through elevated ceilings and a varied palette of materials and textures including exposed brick walls, timber panelling, stone flooring and earthy muted colours. Laura has a great eye for furniture and fixtures that convey a sense of luxury and comfort.” An opaque circular ceiling window – like the one over the Staircase Hall of Alfred’s County Wicklow home – lights the Lobby leading into the large open plan Reception Room.

“Following on from the Gatelodge project, the Bowes wanted to provide more bedroom accommodation,” remarks Albert. “Rather than extend the main house it was decided to provide five freestanding Pond Suites. They’re of a contemporary design intended to complement the woodland setting. Each Suite has large windows and a terrace orientated to capture great views over the pond and island.” Margaret adds, “They’re called The Peacock, The Fox, The White Heron and The Blue Heron. We named the two bedroom suite The Nest.”

He continues, “The Pond Suites are constructed in a lightweight timber frame walling sitting on bored pile foundations to minimise disruption to the ground beneath. The floors are floating just above ground level. Main exterior walls are clad in cedar which will transform into a silver grey finish over time. The rear walls and monopitched roofs are clad in black coated zinc. We used Crittal steel windows. The monopitched design maximises the height of the façade glazing.”

As night falls and sun sets, dinner in the Conservatory hits more high notes than a Wexford Festival Opera diva. First there’s the prelude of parmesan and spice bread which sides the Courgette and Goat’s Cheese Canapé. Mozart in a mouthful. Seared Irish Scallops (roast apple purée, Granny Smith crisp) form the brisk and lively first movement of this incredible edible symphony. Pachelbel on a plate. Roast Onion Soup is lyrically relaxing. Bach in a bowl. Fillet of Pan Seared Halibut (concasse of tomato, sugar snap peas, mussels, lemon beurre blanc) ups the tempo and pumps the mood music. Tchaikovsky on the tastebuds. Marlfield Garden Rhubarb Millefeuille (vanilla pastry cream, candied ginger) provides a rollocking finale. Pudding is La Passione. Encore will be breakfast and encore une fois coffee and shortbread while the car pulls up for departure.

“I joined the team in 1994 after working in event management in London,” Margaret concludes. “Laura arrived back in 2004 after leaving the film industry. She is responsible for brand development and I take care of the sales department. On a daily basis, we manage the hotel together. Ireland is essentially a rural country and I’ve lived in the countryside for much of my life. My love of nature is my way of expressing the attachment, this Irish identity.” A tortoiseshell runs past into the herbaceous border. Margaret mourns, “George the peacock and the ginger cat died a couple of years ago. In July and August, George was always crowing, calling out for a lady. There are three cats now. They just appear! There are lots of birds too.” On cue, a heron swoops out of the pond, past two gliding ducks.

Five years after opening, Marlfield became a member of the coveted Relais et Châteaux group. Add sustainability to its list of qualities. The Gatelodge has triple glazed windows and a heat pump. That open plan layout is never draughty. “We strive to constantly reduce our carbon footprint,” assures Margaret. “We operate on green energy and are moving towards biogas. The Pond Suites are close to zero carbon. Our menus use local produce within a radius of a few kilometres. Over the last two years we have planted at least 150 trees.”

Courtown House long gone, Marlfield House is in its golden era. The dowager is now the doyenne.

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Killymoon Castle + Estate Cookstown Tyrone

The First of the Best Two Days

It was the poster boy of the 1970s, gracing the covers of various publications. Half a century later, a new generation of aesthetes is falling in love with the romantically named and romantically styled and romantically positioned Killymoon Castle. Richard Oram and Peter Rankin included a sketch of the south elevation on the cover of their Ulster Architectural Heritage Society Listings for Cookstown and Dungannon. “The Nash block is of ashlar, a strong roll moulding surrounding it at basement level. Behind, the earlier back-quarters are of rubble, castellated, buttresses added and certain windows enlarged by Nash, the roofs of graduated slates… Behind the house, a stable and farmyard, including a substantial two storey block with Gibbsian door surrounds.”

In another Ulster Architectural Heritage Society publication from last century, An Introduction to Ulster Architecture, Hugh Dixon, wrote, “Interest in the picturesque resulted in the Gothick castle style becoming a fashionable alternative to the neoclassical for country houses. Pioneered by Richard Payne Knight at Downton Castle, Herefordshire, the asymmetrical castle was made popular by the Prince Regent’s architect, John Nash, whose large practice extended to Ulster on several occasions. Killymoon Castle is clearly a sham unlike Gosford Castle (by Thomas Hopper, circa 1820) at Markethill, County Armagh, where really thick walls and correct medieval windows show a new more serious approach. Generally more popular in Ulster was the symmetrical castle, a type developed by Robert Adam in Scotland. Adam, indeed, remodelled Castle Upton in County Antrim (1788) in this style, although it has had later alterations. Among the best local designs are Necarne, Irvinestown, County Fermanagh (circa 1825) and the delightfully simple Dungiven Castle, County Derry (1839).”

Brian de Breffny included Killymoon in his Castles of Ireland and featured it on the dust jacket. “John Nash, the celebrated architect of Regency England, also designed a few buildings in Ireland, including some parish churches and four Gothick castles, two of which are Killymoon and Lough Cutra. Shanbally Castle, County Tipperary, which he built about 1812, was larger than either of these. The fourth castle, Kilwaughter, County Antrim, is a not very successful adaptation of an earlier house, and is now in a state of disrepair… Before he was engaged in radically transforming parts of London by such creations as Regent’s Park, Regent’s Street, Trafalgar Square and Carlton House Terrace, and before his work on Brighton Pavilion. It brought him other Irish commissions through the family connections of James Stewart, Member of Parliament for County Tyrone, the satisfied client… The house at Killymoon built by James Stewart’s father, William Stewart, who also built the nearby town of Cookstown about 1750, was largely destroyed by fire about 1800.”

Each publication has a different take on its castellation: the dressing of the original castle to complement the new building; the light hearted asymmetry; and the heralding of the architect’s popularity for designing castles in Ireland. Killymoon Castle was John Nash’s first – and finest – castle in Ireland. Dorothy Coulter, who lives in the castle with her husband Godfrey, knows its history well. “Killymoon Castle was built in 1671 by James Stewart who had bought the lease five years earlier from Alan Cooke, the founder of Cookstown. The Stewarts had come over from Scotland during the Plantation of Ulster. They set up two castles at that time: Killymoon and Ballymena Castle. Six generations later, the Stewarts left Killymoon in 1852. There are six houses built by the Stewarts still in Cookstown Old Town.”

The original building was mostly destroyed by fire in 1802. Dorothy reckons, “Colonel James Stewart built this castle a year later and it must have been a truly wonderful fairy tale to bring his beautiful wife Lady Molesworth to this romantic spot!” She points to his portrait in the central hall. “He met John Nash on his Grand Tour. James frequently visited London to gamble with the Prince Regent at Carlton House. Apparently he gambled Killymoon Castle one night with Prince Regent and lost it on the turn of the cards. I don’t envy him coming back to his wife after that! Fortunately the Prince Regent told him he could keep his ‘Irish cabin’. The other portrait is of his father William Stewart. He brought James back from the Grand Tour as he wanted him to stand for MP for Tyrone and he stood and he had the seat for 44 years. He was well liked. The estate changed hands several times after the Stewarts until timber merchant Gerald Macura bought it in 1916. He wanted to make railway sleepers from felling the trees.”

The Public Records Office Northern Ireland’s Introduction to Stewart of Killymoon Papers, 2007, sheds some light on Lady Molesworth, “In 1772 Stewart married Elizabeth Molesworth, daughter of the 3rd Viscount Molesworth. She was one of the survivors of a tragic fire in London in 1763, where she was living with her widowed mother. Lady Molesworth senior, two of her daughters and six of the servants were killed. Two other daughters were badly injured when they jumped from upper windows – one had to have her leg cut off after landing on the railings below – and a third was badly burned. Elizabeth Stewart became in 1794 a co-heiress of her late brother, the 4th Viscount Molesworth, and inherited a share of the Molesworth estates in Dublin City, near Swords, County Dublin, and in and around Philipstown, King’s County.”

A castle is not a castle without a ghost. Dorothy relates, “Gerald Macura’s 97 year old daughter came to visit us a couple of years ago. She’d such fond memories of the castle and told me how as a six year old child she used to hear ghostly footsteps going up and down the secondary staircase. She had that story built up in her head all those years. I said to her, ‘But there only is one staircase!’ We went on a tour of the house and upstairs she showed me something. There were so many different layers of paint over the door you could only see the shape of the frame so when we looked into that cupboard there was this other door that opened into a set of stairs that went up to James’s room in the top of the circular tower! He had a whole big bedroom suite that went out onto the balcony. She said it was really just the joy of her life getting back to Killymoon; she died not long afterward.”

Dorothy reveals, “My husband’s great grandparents lived over the bridge past those trees and these grounds came up for sale. His great grandfather John Coulter bid £2,000 on the grounds but all the bids were rejected. So six months later the Bank of Ireland put it up for sale again and he increased his bid by an extra £100 and this time it was to include the castle. He was successful so everyone thinks it was a great deal as he got the castle for £100! They moved in with their two sons Tommy and Jacky at the end of 1921.”

A suitably long drive winds through parkland and farmland, past the château-like 18th century stable block to one side, until the porte cochère of the castle finally appears. And there it is, the castle in all its glory, one of the great architectural moments of early 19th century Ireland – still unrivalled in early 21st century Ireland. The genius at work: rectangular, elliptical and polygonal components of varying heights fitting together like the pieces of an intricate three-dimensional puzzle, unified by Gothick windows, Romanesque detailing and a castellated roofline. John Nash added buttresses to the adjoining remaining portion of the old rubble stone castle and remodelled some of its windows to be more in keeping with his cut stone architectural masterpiece.

The interior is equally ingenious. A slender row of stairs connects the porte cochère to the tall spacious central hall. The piano nobile is elevated by a raised basement. “That’s the Stewart and Molesworth coats of arms in the stained glass over the front door,” highlights Dorothy. The central hall is linked by a Gothick arch to the staircase hall with its cantilevered stone stairs flying off in opposite directions like the wings of a dinosaur. John Nash knew how to deliver drama! Another great spatial flow running parallel with the inner halls is formed by an enfilade of four adjoining reception rooms overlooking the sloping lawn and field down to Ballinderry River. The variety of room shapes seems endless. Apses and niches and balconies and vestibules show such a grasp of spatial acuity. Oak detailing and ornate plasterwork define and refine the interior throughout. Window shutters concertina out from hidden cavities in the external walls. One of the reception rooms has 1800s wallpaper which survived a major flood.

Dorothy continues, “American soldiers occupied the estate from December 1943 to February 1944. Officers stayed in the castle while paratroopers were housed in Quonset huts. It was the 82nd Airbourne Division that was stationed here. We have retained one of the brick huts built near the river as a cottage for holidaymakers. One of the castle bedrooms has been restored as an officer’s room with militaria and uniformed mannequins. The cellars are now a military museum with a permanent signal post, muster station and officers’ mess. There was a German prison of war camp at the top end of the town. We’ve a lot of letters from the American and German soldiers – they’re all down in the cellars. Killymoon is part of the heritage of Cookstown. It needs people in it to keep it alive.”

“We decided whenever we got married to restore the long end of the castle in the 1970s. Tommy lived down in the back end of the castle.” She continues the tour, “In 2000 we restored the big upstairs library. This room was in ruins – the ceiling was completely down, there were trees growing in it. I said to the builders there’s a ceiling like Nash’s original one here in Kildress Parish Church. They were able to copy the church’s ribbed plasterwork ceiling. The timber floor is new too. The only original features to survive are the windows which date back to the 1600s. One of the bedrooms had no ceiling as well. It was like the planetarium where you could look right up to the sky!”

“We started to restore the roof lantern over the staircase in 2014,” Dorothy recalls. “It had been badly damaged when the Golf Clubhouse was bombed in about 1989.” Since 1889, part of the estate has been Killymoon Golf Club. “Eventually we did get help with the restoration of the roof lantern: the Northern Ireland Environment Agency were very good and we’ve worked with Cookstown Council. Our architects, builders and craftsmen have all been local – real godsends. We’ve been very blessed and are very thankful. Recently, we’ve been working with the Tourist Board promotion ‘Embrace a Giant Spirit’. We won ‘Best Maintenance of a Historic Building or Place at the 2021 Heritage Angel Awards Northern Ireland.”

She adds, “In 2016 we opened the tearoom. On our first day the queue of people stretched down the drive! Our candlelit Christmas dinners have proved a real success. We’re sold out already. It’s a family affair – the grandchildren get their dusters out and we light all the fires. When you see the castle being used for different functions, it brings it to life. We’ve had people visit here from all over the world. We are very busy with group tours too.” Today, afternoon tea is served in the east and south facing Lady Molesworth’s morning room with views (once admired by Queen Mary, wife of King George V) across the 122 hectare estate. Under the shallow dome laced by a patera frieze, potato and leek soup is served in china cups on saucers. Grandfather clocks tick and chime to the passing of time.