One hears of those defining moments in others’ lives that set them off on a journey. In retrospect, mine was in 1964 at the Belfast College of Art, when our studio master set the task for a class of young aspiring architects to prepare a thesis on The Gate Lodges and Estate Entrance Gates of Northern Ireland, to raise our awareness of the purity, form and symmetry of classical architecture (mysteriously to prepare us for a career in concrete and glass). The effect this had on me was to stir up a fascination for everything to do with the Irish country house, its owners and their estates – my journey of about 30,000 miles in 53 years had begun.
Already a habitual collector, with prized albums of postage stamps (an interest which rapidly waned when they began issuing annually in their thousands), I resolved to produce an “album” on the big house in Ireland – to do a Bence-Jones, if you like. Unexpectedly, Bence-Jones got there first in 1978 with his Guide to Irish Country Houses, thus lumbering me with copious research and apparently nowhere to go with it – until, that is, Hugh Dixon, that genial Anglo-Ulster architectural historian, suggested expanding that college thesis into a book, The Gate Lodges of Ulster, a much more accessible subject and one whose fieldwork involved being driven, Pevsner-like, in a Fiat 500 about the highways and byways of the province by an obliging spouse. It was published by the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society in 1994.
Thereafter withdrawal symptoms set in until, to my wife’s horror, I decided to complete the job. It had been 30 years since the setting of the seed and its germination, but flowering could not be achieved until coverage of the other three provinces was complete. In that time I had realised that here was a unique building type seriously under threat of extinction and urgently requiring to be recorded for posterity, succumbing as it was to road realignment, developer greed, planning incompetence and lack of appreciation by the heritage authorities; such was the case both North and South. From the early Ordnance Survey maps about 10,000 gate lodges were identifiable, of which about 40 per cent have been lost without trace, a further 30 per cent are ruinous or derelict and the remainder occupied, although many of those have suffered “improvement”.
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Here, too, was a building type which to date had received scant attention in print from historians. Dr Maurice Craig in his otherwise definitive The Architecture of Ireland offered but half a page out of 325, but barely a Christmas passed without yet another tome on the Big House, despite this little structure displaying the full spectrum of architectural styles by the roadside – from the plain astylar box to Georgian Gothick, neo-Classical, Italianate, Cottage Orné, English country cottage, Tudorbethan, Arts and Crafts and International Movement. Memorable are the likes of that sweet two-roomed thatched vernacular cottage immaculately maintained at the gate to Fosterstown, Co. Meath, the Scots Baronial gatehouse at Gilltown, Co Kildare, the ludicrous French Renaissance example at Rathaspick, Co Wexford, the amazing Hindu-Gothick lodge at Dromana, Co Waterford (where the Brighton Pavilion came and pupped), and those extraordinary picturesque battlemented extravaganzas at Duckett’s Grove, Co Carlow, and the 100-yard-wide prelude to Markree Castle, Co Sligo.
It was at the gates that the landed gentry and the aristocracy would exhibit to passers-by and neighbours their wealth, power and taste – some estates displaying multiple lodges, such as the original 10 at Bessborough, Co Kilkenny. Descended from the medieval gatehouse, the porter’s lodge became a phenomenon of the British Empire, reaching its apogee in Ireland, where it was such a defensive necessity in newly built demesne walls of the landed estates. Appearing as they did from the accession of the Georges after 1714, over a period of 200 years they became, by the late nineteenth century, little more than status symbols, when security had become less of an issue. By Partition their time had passed and they were later succeeded by the remote-controlled security gate, but not before the gatekeeper’s lodge had graced the gates to suburban villas, schools, workhouses, convents, churches and cemeteries.
Thus I resolved to prepare books on the gate lodges of the remaining provinces, to raise public awareness of their plight. Apart from the joy of unearthing old photographs of lost lodges and original architects’ drawings both of those built and of designs not realised on site, there were the delights of travelling and exploring off the beaten track and meeting those remaining lodge-dwellers and their offers of cups of tea – a pleasure but for three encounters: there was the occupant of a Co Tipperary lodge who insisted that photography required the written permission of his landlord; the litigious owner of that in the south Dublin suburbs who threatened court action if an image of her gatehouse was published; and finally and memorably that furious and zealous custodian of what remained of a lodge in Co Waterford, which for once I was pleased to find ruinous as ideal for purposes of a comfort stop, which was interrupted by a thunderous “What are you doin’ there?” To the general direction of the disembodied voice I explained my mission. This he considered, and directed: “You can take your camera and go straight back to where you came from”. I beat a dignified retreat to the car, extracting a writing pad to hurriedly record my findings, upon which he bellowed from behind the hedge: “And no feckin’ notes!”
JAK Dean’s The Gate Lodges of Leinster-A Gazetteer is published by Wordwell Press at €40, with volumes on those of Connacht and Munster due for publication in 2017 to complete a tetralogy – and a long journey
