Ballintubbert House lies behind a web of magnificent trees and shrubs, its driveway curling through fuchsia that bells over a low, stone wall. It was to this house, in the Co Laois hamlet of Ballintubbert, that the Rev Frank Day-Lewis came as Church of Ireland rector in 1902. He and his wife, Kathleen, had just married in Dublin.
The clerical demands of Ballintubbert were not great. Apart from conducting Sunday service in the tiny church across the field from the house, the Rev Day-Lewis's main occupation seems to have been hosting and attending tea parties.
The house itself is a substantial building, set back from the road. Even then, the trees in the garden were mature and lent it an air of privacy. For a couple from the city, the house brought mixed blessings. It was friendly and welcoming but it also had its practical drawbacks - leaks, draughts and so on - none of which the rector and his wife were particularly adept at dealing with. Fourteen months after their arrival in Ballintubbert their only son, Cecil, was born in the house, on April 27th 1904. It wasn't until Cecil was six months old that his father bothered to register his birth and then the registrar got the details wrong, recording his Christian names as Cecil Day and his surname as Lewis. A year later the family was gone from Ballintubbert, the Rev Day-Lewis having decided promotion was more likely through the Church of England: they left for Worcestershire.
The family was to move soon again, to Ealing, where Cecil's mother died when he was four.The future Poet Laureate was to move homes a number of times in the following decade but throughout his adult life he maintained a spiritual and practical connection with Ireland. He can have retained few memories of his 18 months at Ballintubbert House, but his time there certainly exercised both his imagination and his empathy for that corner of Co Laois. In 'The House Where I was Born', written more than 50 years after the family left Ballintubbert, he writes with great fondness and desire for his birthplace: "No one is left alive to tell me/ In which of those rooms I was born,/ Or what my mother could see, looking out one April/Morning, her agony done,/Or if there were pigeons to answer my cooings/ From the tree to the left of the lawn."
It's hardly surprising, really, that Ballintubbert House was so important to Day-Lewis. It was there that he was born and it was there that almost half the time he shared with his mother was spent.
Ballintubert is still a hamlet, as it was at the turn of the last century. On one of the pillars at the church gate there's a plaque to commemorate the planting of lime trees by local writers on the poet's birthday in 1985. By then, Cecil Day-Lewis was already 13 years dead. Otherwise, there's nothing to suggest his association with the area - other than the poems that celebrate its beauty and his memories, real and imagined.
Ballintubbert House is in the village of Ballintubbert. From Athy, take the R428 and follow the sign for Ballintubbert. The house is not currently open to the public