The great house of Ballyfin, near Portlaoise, is not a memorial to James Cavanah Murphy and his famous book, Arabian Antiquities of Spain (1816). It is his monument. It may be possible still to see at Cavendish Square, off Regent Street in London, something of the city in which he settled after years in Portugal and Spain, but it is at Ballyfin, among the woods and lakes of the Irish midlands, that Murphy's influence on the architecture of these islands is enshrined.
His literary commentaries extolling the Moorish tradition of Spain were classics in their day.
Born in obscure circumstances in Blackrock in Cork in 1760, Murphy was working as a bricklayer when his dexterity with a pencil was noticed first by Sir James Chatterton. Encouraged to study in Dublin, Murphy became an architect; according to the Dictionary of National Biography, he was one of several charged with overseeing James Gandon's design for the additions to the Irish House of Commons - and won the attention of the Hon William Burton Conyngham, Teller of the Irish Exchequer and no friend, it appears, of Gandon.
These were the years of that architectural fervour which would lead to the Gothic Revival in England, and Conyngham's interest had been aroused by stories of the 14th-century Dominican church at Batalha, founded by King John I of Portugal. It was to make drawings of this building that Conyngham sent Murphy to Portugal in 1788. That first visit was to lead to another, in 1802, this time to Cadiz, where the enthralled Murphy spent the next seven years, engaged in diplomatic missions while studying the Moorish elements of Spanish architecture.
Ballyfin was built for Sir Henry Charles Coote by Sir Richard Morrison of Midleton, Co Cork, and his son William Vitruvius. It is now a school run by the Patrician Brothers. The order has kept its modern school buildings to the yards and stable areas of the demesne so that the house, currently the subject of a fund-raising campaign by the Irish Georgian Society and increasingly fragile as the needs of the Brothers diminish with time, can still justify its title as the Morrisons' classical masterpiece.
Writing about Ballyfin in September 1973, Edward McParland, of Trinity College, Dublin, explained that in Ballyfin, as in other Morrison houses, "the patterns are taken from James Cavanah Murphy's Arabian Antiquities of Spain.
"Such a source was not as obscure in the 1820s as it now seems. At the time, Murphy's writings were enjoying a continental vogue in German and French translations, and the influence of his Batalha engravings on the Gothic Revival is well established."
Murphy returned to England in 1809 and devoted himself to the publication of Arabian Antiquities, complete with the 98 plates described as "dazzling" by Edward McParland. It was also "a work beyond all price" which cost more than £10,000 in its publication, a staggering sum in 1816, given that Gandon's extensions to the Houses of Parliament had cost about £25,000. Although Murphy published both books and papers during his lifetime, this, his greatest work, appeared posthumously.
Ballyfin is his true literary landmark.