Tag: thomas jackson

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Tullylagan Manor + Tullylagan Country House Hotel Cookstown Tyrone

Many Mansions

A corrugated roof colour coordinating with a crinkly hedge. Driving out of Cookstown, vernacular soon gives way to splendour.

The evolution of country house styles over three centuries could be told through one estate on the outskirts of Cookstown in County Tyrone. Businessman Thomas Greer commissioned Thomas Jackson to design Tullylagan Manor. Born in 1807 in Waterford City to a Quaker family, Thomas moved to Belfast aged 22 and eventually became a partner in Thomas Duff’s office (Parkanaur in County Tyrone is one of the practice’s many projects). Belfast is still a benefiter of the diverse talent of Thomas Jackson, from the 1830s Greek Revival Old Museum Building (now home to Ulster Architectural Heritage) to the 1840s Tudor Revival St Malachy’s Catholic Church.

Built in 1828, Tullylagan Manor is a restrained Greek Revival house relying on the Doric order for detailing. It consists of a three bay (entrance front) and four bay (garden front) two storey over exposed basement villa and long lower two storey wing, faced in coursed ashlar sandstone, roofed in Bangor blue slates. The entrance is in a full height pilastered porch. Or rather consisted of a two storey over exposed basement. Montalto in County Down and Tullylagan Manor are rare examples of basements being excavated to form ground floors. In 1904, Thomas MacGregor Greer commissioned this structural work as well as exterior steps up to what became a first floor entrance.

Thomas MacGregor Greer (so many Thomases!) originally appointed London architects Alfred Henry Hart and Percy Leslie Waterhouse to design a replacement building. His grandfather’s neoclassical house must have looked positively old fashioned. The unexecuted design is very modern and very English. The layout includes state of the art bathrooms and a basement heating chamber. A proliferation of oriels, chamfered bays and gables along with transom and mullion windows creates a straight out of the Cotswolds look. The closest Alfred and Percy’s plans came to fruition was to be exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1904.

Four unsigned unexecuted schemes are in the Public Records Office Northern Ireland. One plan is for two extensions to the existing house, both projecting from the entrance front. Another plan for “Proposed Alterations to House” is much more radical. The extant drawings are of the basement, ground and first floorplans. The main reception rooms are laid out behind a two bay setback flanked by chamfered bay windows. A three storey return wing extends to the rear. Some rooms are named after colours (Blue, Crimson, Green, Pink, White and Yellow), others after outlook (East, West and South) and one after wood (Walnut). This proposal would have doubled the size of the house and created a symmetrical entrance front.

The largest proposal is for a replacement house. There are three layout variations: one with a central staircase hall; one with a central stadium shaped (rectangle with semicircle ends) hall with the staircase to the side; and another with a central polygonal hall with the staircase to the side. The fourth unexecuted scheme is of a symmetrical ground floorplan with a large semicircular porch. Accompanying sketches illustrate it was to be a two storey plus attic house. Elaborate details include Dutch gables with finials. Digging to expose the basement was clearly the least ambitious and most economic option. Perhaps Thomas MacGregor Greer decided Greek Revival wasn’t so bad after all.

A newbuild wouldn’t happen at Tullylagan until the end of the 20th century. Rather than replace Tullylagan Manor, owners Raymond and Hilary Turkington decided to build a 16 bedroom hotel in the ample grounds. Tullylagan Country House Hotel soon became one of the most popular destinations in the County. Turkingtons, their eponymous store in Cookstown remains one of the best interiors shops in the Province. Hilary’s brother designed the long two storey hotel in a neo Palladian form with a seven bay main block flanked by three bay setbacks terminated by gable fronted two bay wings. A square porch with a tripartite window to the front and entrance door to the side with 1930s style stained glass as well as a lush covering of ivy draping over the exterior add to its charm. Outbuildings of Tullylagan Manor were converted to further hotel accommodation. Tullylagan Country House Hotel closed in 2021: a new operator is sought to take it over.

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Parkanaur Castlecaulfield Tyrone + Thomas Duff

Tudor Revival Survival

Forest parks on Irish demesnes often have a vital missing component: the country house. All too many were mindlessly demolished in the mid 20th century. Pomeroy House and Seskinore House both in County Tyrone are sadly typical examples. In those two cases all that remain are the stables and a footprint of the house just about legible from an aerial view. Parkanaur is a remarkable exception: the entire house with its rambling wings and outbuildings is intact and in use. Just to add to the country estate feel, white fallow deer descended from a pair gifted by Queen Elizabeth I in 1597 to her niece at Mallow Castle in County Cork roam an enclosure overlooked by the house.

In 1771, an Anglo Irish gentleman Ynyr Burges bought the Parkanaur Estate from the Caulfield family. John Henry Burges, a cousin of John Henry’s daughter Lady Poulet, leased the estate and built a triple gabled hunting lodge about 1804. The entrance door was to the left of the present one. A south wing was added in 1821 when the house became the family seat. John Henry’s son John Yner received an inheritance from Lady Poulet in 1838 enabling him to buy the freehold of the estate the following year.

John Yner commissioned the architect Thomas Duff to design a large extension which was completed at a cost of £3,000 in 1848. The original house has windows with mullions and Georgian astragals; the later addition has mullioned windows with leaded lights. The two principal fronts, at a perpendicular angle to one another, back onto courtyards surrounded by substantial outbuildings included a coach house and tower. The rear elevation of the largest courtyard building with its Georgian sash windows is three storeyed due to the sloping land.

The completed Parkanaur is a handsome Tudor Revival house. Thomas Duff was a serious architect. His oeuvre includes the Catholic Cathedrals of St Patrick’s Armagh, St Patrick’s Dundalk and St Patrick and St Colman’s Newry. Narrow Water Castle outside Newry, equally belonging to the revivification of the Tudor Style, is also by his hand. He partnered for a short time with the equally talented Belfast architect Thomas Jackson. The Newry based architect is credited with designing the first Presbyterian portico in Ulster at Fisherwick Place Church in Belfast.

As a Catholic, Thomas Duff was an unusual choice for Protestant commissions and clients. John Yner and his wife Lady Caroline also made improvements to the demesne, planting thousands of trees each year. The Burges enjoyed a sociable lifestyle revolving around entertaining and visiting other Anglo Irish families. Castle Leslie in County Monaghan, Glenarm Castle in County Antrim and Killymoon Castle in County Tyrone – neighbours in aristocratic terms – were all on their social circuit.

The 1830s were halcyon years for the Burges family. But the following decade, three of their four sons died leaving just two daughters. Lady Caroline sold the carriage horses to fund charitable efforts after the Great Famine struck in 1845. Her husband recorded, “My lady instituted a kitchen with every apparatus and convenience for feeding the labourers, all of whom were fed daily … they got the best beef, potatoes and pudding which sustained them while many were starving … with all this I could not keep my people and no less than 300 went off to America having disposed of their land to try their fortune in a strange country.”

The Burges were benevolent landlords. Lady Caroline’s brother, William Clements 3rd Earl of Leitrim, was not: he was murdered for his callousness in 1878. During World War II, Parkanaur was used as a base for the Western Command, housing 50 military personnel. In 1955, the Burges family sold the house and 25 hectares for £12,000 to Reverend Gerry and Mary Eakin. Their son Stanley had difficulty walking and would later use a wheelchair. The Eakins decided to set up an occupational training college in the house to support disabled students. Parkanaur now celebrates seven decades of educational use and residential care supporting a wide range of needs. It is currently occupied by the Thomas Doran Parkanaur Trust. The demesne continues to be a much loved forest park.

St Michael’s Church of Ireland Church Castlcaulfield is two kilometres from Parkanaur as the falcon files. At the summit of the sloping cemetery stands a Tuscan temple with a gloriously oversized pediment all faced in buff pink (long greyed) Dungannon sandstone. It is the Burges burial vault. There are two tombstones unmissably close to the church entrance porch. One marks the burial place of Frederica Florence Elizabeth (1873 to 1957) Burges of Quintin Castle, Portaferry, County Down (it’s now a nursing home). She was the widow of Ynyr Richard Patrick Burges who was buried in Lawrenny, Pembrokeshire, in 1905. Her tombstone is also over the grave of their daughter Margaret Elizabeth (1908 to 1958). Next to Frederica’s tombstone is the resting place of Major Ynyr Alfred Burges’ (1900 to 1983). The last of the Burges family to own Parkanaur, he was High Sheriff of Counties Armagh and Tyrone. His wife Christine (1908 to 1982) shares the same burial plot.

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Dumpling Library + St Anne’s Square Belfast

Deep Love

Sunday morning opens with a cacophony of hymns on the drawing room family piano deep in the wild west. Things can only get better, as the Belfast singer D:Ream famously once hoped. Eucharist is just sliding into memory at Belfast Cathedral by the time we glide up to the east coast bright lights. Sunday lunch is just a block away in St Anne’s Square. Dumpling Library is a gourmet rather than literary experience. Gucci clad model Janice Blakley joins us for lunch.

Covering most Oriental bases our waitress confirms, “The Dumpling Library is Asian, Canton, Chinese and Malaysian fusion. Sundays are our busiest day.” A solitary unbusy unhurried diner sitting at an island table is reading Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss under a crimson heart dangling from the ceiling. Fried spinach wontons, Japanese tofu, prawn avocado tempura, salt chilli tofu, sweet potato chips … we’re on a (kimchi) roll at our window table.

Pastiche. Yawn. The most unoriginal cliché. An architectural criticism crime. Every glass building is a Meisian copy you might as well say. Neo Geo is neo Geo is neo Geo which sounds dogmatically Gertrude Steinian and rightly so. An accusation of pastiche – and St Anne’s Square has had more than its unjust desserts – is about as original as claiming somewhere has been “restored to its former glory”. What glory? When? Really? The only glory left is in knickerbocker glory. Jonathan Meades gets it spot on as always in his essay France in the collection Pedro and Ricky Come Again, 2020, “… worldwide scream of accusatory architects: ‘Pastiche!’ The architectural doxa decrees that pastiche is a Very Bad Thing Indeed. The collective convention forgets the history of architecture is the history of pastiche and theft: von Klenze’s Walhalla above the Danube is based on the Parthenon; G G Scott’s St Pancras borrows from Flemish cloth halls; Arras’s great squares are imitations of themselves.”

The brilliant critic rants on in his essay Obituaries in the same collection, “Architecture like poetry is founded in copyism and plagiarism – both vertical, looting the past; and horizontal, stealing from the present. The obscure past, of course, and the geographically distant present.” St Anne’s Square has proved an easy target for lazy uneducated reviewers. Completed in 2010, it is Taggarts Architects’ Portland stone and red brick clad with whimsically oversized foray into late postmodernist neo Georgianism. Giant quoins have form in this quarter: Sir Charles Lanyon’s Northern Bank, Thomas Jackson’s Scottish Amicable Life Building and Corn Exchange Building all belong to the bigger is better school. Funky, not fashionable. The buildings of St Anne’s Square are just tall enough and wide enough to create an intimate public realm with a floorplate gap perfectly framing the chamfered ambulatory of the cathedral and its 2007 stainless steel spirelet. Dumpling Library is one of several ground floor courtyard facing restaurants below apartments. This mixed use development also includes a 168 bedroom Ramada Hotel.

At least St Anne’s Cathedral has never been accused of being pastiche. Ever since Belfast architects Thomas Drew and William Henry Lynn drew up its Romanesque origins in 1868, this building evolved over the next 139 years into something quite unique, slightly hard to place yet paradoxically somehow of its place and time(s). Idiosyncratic, not imitative. “The cathedral is a huge moment,” declares Ireland’s leading neoclassical architect John O’Connell. In another church in another country in another discipline Dr Rowan Williams, Lord Oystermouth, tells us at Westminster Cathedral, “The deepest of the gifts to exchange is love.” We’re loving the new Belfast, especially the next generation murals.