Two Fur Coats in Bantry House... and a Colourful Bathroom.

As I promised, here's some more from my trip to West Cork in Ireland.  One of my favourite trips was to Bantry House. I'd wanted to see it for years, after K visited it and highly recommended it as "a bit crazy".  So T and I drove out there one rather drizzly day.  

Here's the house, distantly viewed against the Bantry bay's foggy backdrop.  Can you make out the hills on the other side?   

 Bantry House looks very like an English country house, built in English style by the Earls of Bantry, who were English earls. But of course it is not English.    When Ireland became a republic in 1922, many of the English gentry's mansions had had a pretty rough time.  But more of that later.   

And here's a more formal view, backed by the tall cupolas of the house's two sets of stables in the background on either side. To have a set of huge matching stables gives an idea of just how much money was flying around in this place in the nineteenth century. 

In those days, Bantry House was known for its contents - the Second Earl's astounding collection of fine art and antiques.  In its heyday, too, there were 24 gardeners, making sure that the gardens and grounds surrounding the house were worthy of the stupendous contents.    

But the title was extinguished in 1899 when the last Earl died without a son and heir, and the twentieth century brought a very different world. Independence was on the horizon for Ireland, after many centuries of occupation.  It was finally achieved in 1922, and before that, in a spiral of upheaval, the British gentry's houses were quite often burned down by Irish republicans who didn't see why they were needed by anyone at all. 

Even after 1922,  and even with the houses that survived, there were problems.  The Great War of 1914-18 changed society radically.  After it ended, servants became harder to find, big landowners were hit by savage taxes, and everyone involved with grand mansions began to realise the palmy days were coming to an end.   Many big houses, both in England and Ireland, were abandoned or demolished for purely financial reasons.. 

Bantry House, though, struggled through all this.  This was probably largely thanks to a woman called Arethusa Leigh-White (below) who married the house's owner, Edward.

She was a public spirited and compassionate woman, who when chaos gripped Ireland, offered to put Bantry House at the disposal of the local Sisters of Mercy nuns to use as a hospital for the local poor and wounded, including all those who had fought in the independence battles, no matter what their political views or circumstances.    As philanthropists, she and her husband were also more popular with the local people than many an English landowner.  The picture above, the only image of Arethusa I could find online, is captioned with information about her dedication to the Girl Guides/Girl Scouts movement and its work for internationalism and cooperation. 

Bantry's fate might have been different if Arethusa's husband had not died relatively young.  The biggest disaster in Bantry's existence, though, occurred after he died and his eldest daughter inherited the estate. 

  Clodagh Leigh-White, (above) was only a teenager when she inherited, so was only able to take control of the house when she reached the age of 21, in 1926.    She seems to have been a pleasant lady, but not the brightest diamond in the diadem.  She began selling off the house's contents to keep going, and also opened it to the public in 1946, but seemed to have no real idea of what to do apart from keep selling things.   Unfortunately, it apparently never occurred to her to learn about the treasures she was selling, let alone get an idea of what they were worth.   

 The catastrophe came in 1956, when she sold a priceless set of Renaissance paintings by F & G Guardi for £300 to a sweet talking sharpster from Dublin.  The value of this intact set of eight huge paintings, even in those days, was gigantic, and today it would be truly inestimable, running into tens of millions of pounds.  What a difference even a fraction of that money would make to the house now. 

  From all accounts, Clodagh did not fully realise what she'd done. She was apparently pretty pleased with herself for making the sale, and went on a cruise, or so I was told by one of the guides working at the house. Towards the end of her life, she was reduced to living in the vast library (part of which is shown below) wearing two fur coats to keep warm.        

 The library is a gigantic room, and the rooms above had to be rebuilt so its ceiling could be as toweringly high as the earl required to suit his  megalomaniac tastes.  This set of doors used to lead into a magnificent glass conservatory, now vanished, and it now offers an unimpeded view of 100 steps cut into the hill. Only the earl,  his family and their guests were allowed to use it (and they would have needed to be reasonably fit to do so) but the view from the top was really spectacular.  Here it is in the house's heyday, with the conservatory in place.  

  Now, Bantry House relies on part time or volunteer gardeners. Inevitably the grounds lack the formal perfection of old, but recent owners have harnessed several years of EU-funded restoration, and with dedicated volunteer helpers and clever economising they have maintained a charming and creative setting for the house.  

Arethusa's descendants still own Bantry House, and are still working hard to keep it going. They have tried various things.  You might like to watch the Channel 4 programme about Bantry in its "Country House Rescue" series in 2012 on Youtube   to see the kind of challenges they have faced.  The solutions put forward in the programme were not really practical, though, and by 2014 the Leigh-Whites had decided to sell the entire contents of the house, and were pleading for help.  It turned out that the auctioneers didn't have the right licence to sell the items, and somehow (I never found out quite how) the sale was avoided and the house has been keeping going partly as a wedding and event venue, and partly on other schemes which capitalise on its setting.  Money is still tight, though, and some areas of the house are still not open to the public because they are too dilapidated.

What I liked about the place, apart from its seat-of-the-pants recent history, was the welcoming and  - yes - happy atmosphere.  One of the family members now helps out doing the gardening and running the tearoom in part of the old kitchen. The food is simple, but very good, and I liked the notice warning customers about the family dogs which may appear hoping for food.  

The people who work there obviously love the place, and there are personal and humorous touches everywhere.  I loved the picture-within-a-picture below: a lovely little painting of a chair stands on the chair itself.  

 I didn't research the family emblems, but there's a stork-like bird with a coronet which was presumably associated with the earldom.  Here's a stone version, coronet around its neck, guarding the front door. 

Similar birds appear on ornaments, or holding candlesticks. 

 

 

 They feature, too, on amusing direction signposts in the garden.  Here is one about to partake of a cup of tea... 

these two are respectively using a wheelchair or else need baby changing facilities.

 

And what is the house like inside? Well, even after decades of selling off the contents, there is no shortage of interesting and beautiful things to see.  Here are a few photos at random, starting with part of the atmospheric front hallway with a dramatic Russian Orthodox shrine in the background.

A most beautiful dolls house full of furniture stands in one of the bedrooms. 

And there is a remarkable dining room, the biggest I have ever seen outside a hotel.  Its splendid and elaborately carved sideboards stretch across three walls.  There are lovely tapestries, beautiful china and imposing oil paintings. 

One wing of the house, is now given over to the family's bed and breakfast business, and that's something I would like to try.   No rooms were available during my visit, but when I return to Ireland I hope to stay there if I can.  What sold the idea to me is that apparently, after hours, when night falls, the guests are allowed to open a secret door into the library and creep in to light the fire ....  

....and play music... 

..... read some of the interesting books, lounge on a sofa with a drink, admire the details of the architecture

 and generally make themselves at home while the trees blow in the darkness outside. 

Of course all old mansions worth their salt have a ghost, and Bantry's ghost seems to float vaguely around upstairs without anyone being too sure of who it is supposed to be.  I'm sort of glad it's not the  the shade of poor Clodagh in her two fur coats.    I'm also glad that the house's air of life and character makes it feel as if it will survive.   1922 is long enough ago now, and Ireland is now doing better than Britain in many ways.  I think it can afford to see places like this as part of its own history, and not merely as symbols of oppression.

Coming back to today, in my last post, I said I'd show some photos of the multi coloured washrooms in the airport hotel at Cork.  We stayed there the night before flying back to London, and I only wanted to wash my hands before going into the bar that evening but when I walked into the washroom I was  thunderstruck - all those huge square sinks standing in a circle, each with an oval mirror above and all bathed in bright pink and purple colour.  I loved it. It was like a nightclub. 

I was busy examining the basins and wondering what they were made of - they seemed to glow. And then suddenly I realised that something about the room had changed. 

and before I realised it, everything was bright green. 

I started taking a bit more notice of the hotel. At first glance it had  looked fairly bland in an upmarket way, but thx  I found it wasn't bland. The breakfast was amazing, and a little quirky, and if the bar food is as good as the breakfast that'll maybe help explain why local people seem to drive out from city to spend the evening there, even if they're not flying anywhere. Some unusual coffee table books were to be found in the reception hall. They included sample books from trendy designers,  and were very interesting to look through.  I think I'll stay there again next time I go to Cork.