New dawn for notorious estate at Mourne

CO DOWN €12.66MMourne Park, the home of many earls of Kilmorey, and the subject of a bitter family dispute among the current generation, will leave family ownership after nearly 500 years

AFTER turbulent centuries, none more so than this one, one of Northern Ireland's grandest houses, along with a portion of its breathtaking parklands, is on the market.

Refurbished and glorious as of old, Mourne Park House in Kilkeel outside Rostrevor in Co Down, is on the market for £10million, to include some 160 acres, two gate lodges and a pair of cottages. The grounds include parklands and a lake, stables, an old laundry building, thriving kitchen garden and fishing on the River Whitewater. It's for sale through Knight Frank.

Fabled they may be, to the point of being hackneyed even, but it's impossible still to resist the gobsmacking wonders of the Mourne Mountains on a sunny day, the shining waters of Carlingford Lough, the opulent green, the fishing rivers.

Edward VI was impressed too when, in 1552, he granted land from the wide and lovely expanses around Newry and Mourne to Sir Nicolas Bagnall for the founding of the Kilmorey family's Irish estates.

Mourne Park House was the house Sir Nicolas built on 800 acres of land. Rebuilt in 1806, and gloriously extended in following years, it has housed generations of Kilmorey earls and their families, sheltered visiting notables of all kinds through the centuries. It has seen history, both dark and glittering. It has been a playground to royals and their retinue, and a planning base for the second World War Normandy landings until this century when, sadly, it became the cause of a litigious family dispute.

The estate was divided with Marion Needham Russell inheriting the house, outbuildings and some 160 acres.

A descendent of the earls of Kilmorey, Russell lived her childhood in and around Mourne Park House and had a commitment to and passion for Mourne Park strong enough to have landed her in Maghaberry prison for a week in 2002.

It happened when, as she explains, for their safety and preservation and with litigation ongoing, she removed paintings and more from the then dilapidated house. Most of the contents were later sold in a two-day sale on the premise.

Married to Alan Russell, a businessman man with his own family pedigree in the Mourne mountains, and radiantly expecting their first child Marion Russell, doesn't at all regret her stand for the house and heirlooms. Her time in Maghaberry was, she says, "an education second to none. The women I met in there taught me so much." She's similarly philosophical explaining a family story that's become a cause celebre.

"Ten years ago I was advised by the legal profession that it would take three to six months and a cost of £50,000 to separate mine and the rest of the family's interests in the Kilmorey estate. Now, 10 years and hundreds of pointless pieces of litigation later, with residual matters to be resolved, I've the best, most securely examined title deeds in Ireland!"

Mourne Park House itself has a floor area of about 2,323sq m (25,000sq ft) with 17 bedrooms (several en suite and including a nursery wing and attic bedrooms), kitchen/breakfast room and eight reception rooms. The cottages and gate lodges add an additional living space of some 1,300sq m (14,000sq ft).

Russell, with husband Alan, has put five years and a reasonably sized fortune into the refurbishment of the house. Today's entrance hall welcomes into a wide, high space with lantern skylights showing off a sweep of original floorboards and panelling as well as the drama of a high arch and wide staircase to the first floor bedrooms where views, foliage permitting, stretch to Carlingford Lough.

Changed utterly, Marion Russell says: "Five years ago it was forlorn, lost, the pictures drowning against water logged walls, the roof coming in. I love this place, bringing it back to its wonderful best has been a joy in many ways. A great history goes with this house. It's within me too."

The decision to sell was a hard one, for both of them, and only recently made. In the good humoured, south-facing morning room, where the floorboards were milled from estate wood in 1806 and where a huge box window looks over fountain, lake and woods beyond, she admits to "battling for the future of Mourne Park for 14 years now. I believe if you're lucky enough to be left a place like this you should do everything you can to look after it. It's a place of perfect silence, except for the birdsong. It's one of the most beautiful and private estates in Ireland but we've come to a crossroads. We've properties abroad and find we're only spending part of the year in Mourne Park House."

The time has come to to sell. A legacy, she says, of the litigation but the right decision. She's done the research, checked out planning, road services, the lot. "There's a really exciting future for Mourne Park but it's not for me to do, not any longer. We've already put so much of ourselves into the house. It's slap in the middle of the Mourne Mountains, could be developed without destroying the cartilage of the place, and the area all around is about to become a national park."

It's the best of days to walk the grounds and view the house and impossible, wherever you go, to escape history. In a drawingroom overlooking a landscaped corner of the gardens, a piano by another box window was a gift to the last Lady Kilmorey to live there from her husband the fourth earl in 1920. Sir Malcolm Sargent used play on it, Marion says.

In the bright main bedroom, as elsewhere, there are functioning servant-summoning bells. There are cellars where the old stone is foot-worn, a nursery wing with hand-painted frieze, a labyrinthine ex-servant's quarters and, at the bottom of deep stone steps, a much-used and preserved kitchen complete with hooks for hanging game.

The long blue "party" room, "once almost past being saved", Alan Russell says with pride, has fireplaces at either end, eight windows and a beamed ceiling.

In the grounds outside, where high old trees have been thinned to allow sun to dapple the purples and pinks of rhododendrons, there's an eye-catching Roman toga draped statue of Black Jack, aka the second Earl of Kilmorey and a man who lived a notorious 19th century life. Next to an old tennis court there's a laundry where glazed windows are a reminder of a time when workers weren't allowed to view their "betters" at leisure.

Among rare trees there's one of the biggest and oldest Monkey Puzzle trees in Europe, a Macrophylla beech planted in 1904, lilies in a lily pond, the pervading scent of mown grass and the stones of a dog's graveyard celebrating Paddy (1923-40), Venus (1939-48) and Micna (1890-1900) and others.

Both Marion and Alan Russell feel it's time Mourne Park and lands had a new and opened up life would allow it in time become part of 21st century history.

Mourne Park, Co DownHouse on approx 160 acres with two gate lodges, two cottages, stables and an old laundry building Agent:Knight Frank