Wild Geese
“To me how veritably a palace of enchantment” cries Edward Poe’s character William Wilson in The Fall of the House of Usher. Parts of Glenveagh Castle’s history are as dark as this horror (owner ‘Black Jack’ Adair’s land agent was murdered in 1861; a later owner Arthur Potter would disappear without a trace) but it enjoyed an Indian summer in the mid 20th century as a palace of enchantment. It is a castle in name only. Scots Irish landowner John ‘Black Jack’ Adair built it as a hunting lodge. Architect John Townsend Trench (Black Jack’s cousin) was instructed to use the Royals’ Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire as inspiration. The castellated house is much less chunky that its Scottish forerunner: the architect handles its massing well, no doubt in part due to the incremental building programme. The central house, started in 1867, was gradually extended with a variety of towers, completing in 1901.
Cast iron hoppers, corbelled bartizans, crenellated parapets, crow stepped gables, granite machicolations – the architect plundered the Scottish Baronial textbook to great effect. Perhaps he also read Oscar Wilde’s 1882 essay The House Beautiful, “The use of the natural hues of stone is one of the real signs of proper architecture.” The 16,000 hectare estate passed out of Adair ownership in 1929 when it was bought by the ill fated Harvard Professor Arthur Potter and his wife Lucy who together restored and redecorated the castle. Perhaps they read Oscar’s essay too for the décor follows his rule, “A designer must imagine in colour, must think in colour, must see in colour.”
Glenveagh Castle is too compact to fall under Annabel Davis-Goff’s category “impossible large houses” in her 1989 book about gentry in Ireland, Walled Gardens. But it does fit in with her description, “Even in the grander houses in Ireland there was rarely a bedroom with its own bathroom.” The house really came into its own when Henry McIlhenny bought it in 1937. The Bachelor Corridor is lined with appropriately single bedrooms while being light on en suites. The world (and only occasionally their partner) came to stay. Samuel Barber, best known for composing Adagio for Strings, was a frequent guest.
The American composer and pianist was also a gifted diarist, recording in 1952, “There are two towers in the castle, six drawing rooms, with fires always burning; so I confiscated one at once and messed it up PDQ with orchestration, paper, and pencils, et al, announcing that I would see no one until lunchtime; and I worked very well every day and almost finished two numbers of the ballet; lots of fun working at it. There was really no one to see for almost a week.” He continues, “Joy of joys, peat fires are burning in every room … they call it turf … and burning it has an ineffable perfume, at least for me.” He notes, “We left Glenveagh after a week of candlight and peat and Gaelic twilight.”
Another guest was the highly amusing Rafaelle Duchess of Leinster. Writing in her 1973 entertaining autobiography So Brief a Dream, “I fell head over heels with this enchanting castle. Glenveagh is a divine place to stay. You couldn’t have a more charming host. His sense of things beautiful and comfortable make you want to stay forever. There was only one snag, the undercurrent that so often flows when the guests are more fashionable than friendly, and the host is elsewhere. Every night after dinner when we gathered in the lovely red room warmed by the sweet scented peat fire, you would be wise to see to it that you were the last to leave when it came to say goodnight.” Typically, there is something of a sting in the tail of her tale. Although that pales in comparison to the description of her disastrous wedding in Knightsbridge, London, “He and I walked up the aisle of Holy Trinity Brompton on a December morning in 1932 to the altar of doom ‘for better for worse’ … mainly for worse!”
Henry McIlhenny added more than just colour to the castle: he invested in Victorian paintings by Edwin Landseer, inserted marble chimneypieces salvaged from nearby Ards House in Creeslough, and created a series of extraordinary gardens (enlisting the expertise of leading landscapers Philippe Julian, Lanning Roper and Jim Russell) climbing up the purple headed Derryveagh Mountains and falling down to the eastern shore of Lough Beagh. Mock fortifications enclose a pool raised above the lapping water’s edge. The American tycoon donated the castle and estate to the Irish Government in 1983. Three years later he died just as Glenveagh National Park was opening to the public. Visiting this remote house set in a wilderness on a scorching hot summer day, it’s impossible not to be “married to amazement” to borrow Mary Oliver’s phrase from her 2004 poem Wild Geese.
