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.
