04 June 2019

Martinstown House, a design
influenced by the cottage orné
fashion and Strawberry Hill

Martinstown House … one of the few Irish houses designed by the 19th century architect Decimus Burton (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

During the weekend, I visited Martinstown House, Co Kildare, one of the few Irish houses designed by the 19th century architect, Decimus Burton (1800-1881). This house, built in the 1830s at the edge of The Curragh, is an elegant gothic cottage surrounded by its own miniature park and set in delightful woodland, with an interior that has been beautifully furnished and decorated.

Martinstown House was originally part of the extensive estates of the Dukes of Leinster, and was completed by the Borrowes family in 1832-1840 as a cottage orné.

The cottage orné or decorated cottage style dates back to a movement of ‘rustic’ stylised cottages in the late 18th and early 19th century, when there was a fashion to discover a more ‘natural’ way of living as opposed to the formality of the baroque and neo-classical architectural styles. English Heritage defines the term as ‘a rustic building of picturesque design.’ These cottages often feature well-shaped thatch roofs and ornate timberwork.

Decimus Burton’s design of Martinstown House was inspired by Strawberry Hill House and the cottage ornée style (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

When it came to designing Martinstown House, Burton was inspired by Strawberry Hill House – often known simply as Strawberry Hill – the Gothic Revival villa in Twickenham built by Horace Walpole (1717-1797) in 1749-1776. It is the type example of the ‘Strawberry Hill Gothic’ style of architecture, and it prefigured the 19th century Gothic Revival. Parts of the house were designed by James Essex.

Martinstown House is a fine Strawberry Hill Gothic style cottage ornée in a peaceful setting on its own miniature park, with many fine old trees and a beautiful walled garden. This was originally a farmhouse in the 1730s, but today’s house was built in the early 19th century by Augustus Frederick FitzGerald (1791-1874), 3rd Duke of Leinster and a nephew of the 1798 leader Lord Edward FitzGerald (1763-1874).

The house was designed by Decimus Burton, one of the foremost English architects and urban designers of the 19th century. He worked in the Roman revival, Greek revival, Georgian and Regency styles.

Modern architectural historians, including Guy Williams (1990) and Dana Arnold (2004), say Burton’s contribution to architecture has been grossly underestimated in in the past because many of his works were attributed to Nash, because of the extensive attacks on his work and style by AWN Pugin, and because his family retained his archives, making them inaccessible to scholars for a long time.

Burton’s projects in London included Hyde Park – including the Gate or Screen at Hyde Park Corner and Wellington Arch – Green Park, Saint James’s Park, and Regent’s Park, the enclosure of the forecourt of Buckingham Palace, the Clubhouse of the Athenaeum Club, Carlton House Terrace, and houses at Kew Gardens. Outside London, he planned and designed the seaside resort towns of St Leonards-on-Sea and Fleetwood, and the spa town of Tunbridge Wells.

For two decades, Burton was engaged on a vast landscaping project to renovate the Phoenix Park in Dublin. He was the architect of Dublin Zoo, including the layout and the gates, and also the architect of what later became Garda headquarters in the Phoenix Park, and of the renewal of Queenstown or Cobh as a seaside resort.

Burton was a leading member of Georgian and Regency society in London, and a close friend of Princess Victoria, the future Queen Victoria, the Duchess of Kent, the Duke of Devonshire, Sir John Soane John Nash.

Martinstown House is a cross between a luxury hotel and a private home (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Today, Martinstown is known as a wedding venue with excellent food and a feeling of luxury and elegance. It is a cross between a luxury hotel and a private home, where Edward and Roisin Booth are hands-on owners and engaging hosts. The house also offers dinner parties, lunches, guest accommodation and cooking classes and is a venue for corporate and family gatherings.

Inside, each room has been designed individually to ensure it is unique and dramatic in style and finish.

The Morning Room is decorated with antiques and rare prints of Rome, and is a comfortable, quiet space, with a log fire. The Drawing Room, with double-height ceilings, large sofas, a piano and an open fire, is used for larger parties. The Dining Room is an intimate venue for meals, with a long antique mahogany dining table, sideboards and silver candelabra.

Last weekend, the walled garden was filled with flowers, but it also provides fresh fruit and vegetables. Here, the Vintage Tent hosts large celebrations.

Martinstown House also has a fully working farmyard, and the farm has cattle, sheep, several horses and two rescue donkeys, and the entire estate is a bird sanctuary, with a variety of bird life.

The gardens at Martinstown House were filled with flowers at the weekend (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

A notorious resident of Martinstown House in the 1950s and 1960s was Otto Skorzeny (1908-1975), a leading Nazi and the SS commander who captured Mussolini while he was being held by the allies in a hilltop fortress in Italy.

Skorzeny was born in Vienna and joined the Austrian Nazi party in the early 1930s. At the outbreak of World War II, he was involved in fighting on the Eastern Front, taking part in the German invasions of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. By April 1943, he had become the head of German special forces, in charge of a unit of elite SS commandos.

Fritz von der Schulenburg, the grandfather of the Dublin-based journalist Kim Bielenberg, was captured and tortured by Skorzeny after a plot to kill Hitler.

He was tried for war crimes in 1947 but was acquitted. But Skorzeny remained unapologetic about his Nazi activities and showed no remorse for his war-time activities.

He was a pioneer of what is now known as special operations warfare and in the early 1950s, he was an adviser to the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser, training his army in guerrilla tactics. He later moved to Madrid, where he ran an import-export business, believed by many to be a front for shuttling escaped Nazi war criminals to Argentina. For many years, Skorzeny lived in Argentina where he was Eva Peron’s bodyguard.

Skorzeny first travelled to Ireland from Madrid in June 1957. At a gala reception by politicians and celebrities Portmarnock Country Club hotel, he was feted by Dublin’s social glitterati, including an up-and-coming young Charles Haughey.

Following this warm welcome, Skorzeny bought Martinstown House and the 160-acre farm at the Curragh in 1959, in the hope of becoming a permanent resident in Ireland. He was allowed temporary visas to stay in Ireland with the proviso that he would not travel to Britain.

The latest volume of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy 1957-1961 includes a note from Conor Cruise O’Brien, then a senior official in the Department of External Affairs, in June 1957 referring to a visa application: ‘Skorzeny, who is now stateless, resides in Spain. He is on the UK Home Office blacklist as an undesirable character. I think this means no more than that he made their faces red in the matter of Mussolini. We are not aware of any specific war crimes charges against him.’

Skorzeny applied for permission to become a permanent resident in Ireland. At the end of 1959 another official, Timothy Horan, reported allegations in the French press that Skorzeny was using his residence in Spain to engage shipping arms to Arab countries.

The secretary of the Department of Justice, Peter Berry, advised that Skorzeny be given permanent residency. His view was supported by his minister, Oscar Traynor, but the Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken, strongly advised the Department of Justice against granting residence.

Each room in Martinstown House has been designed individually (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

For a few years, Skorzeny lived a peaceful life at Martinstown House as a gentleman farmer. He stood 6 ft 4 in tall, weighed 250 lb, and was known as ‘Scarface’ because of a long, distinctive scar on his left cheek.

But Irish politicians became increasingly concerned that he was engaged in ‘anti-Semitic activities’ in Ireland. Dr Noel Browne raised concerns in the Dail about Skorzeny’s anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi activities.

Newspaper reports in the early 1960s alleged Skorzeny had opened up an escape route for Nazis in Spain and his farm in Kildare was a refuge for fascists on the run.

In the end, he was unable to obtain a permanent Irish visa and in 1962 he moved back to Spain, still ruled by Franco’s fascist regime. He rarely visited Ireland after 1963 and sold Martinstown House in 1971. He died of cancer in Madrid in 1975, aged 67. Skorzeny never denounced Nazism and was buried by his former comrades who gave Nazi salutes and draped his coffin in Nazi flags and colours.

Martinstown House is now a unique wedding venue (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Saint Brigid’s Cathedral,
Kildare, stands on a site
over 1500 years old

Saint Brigid’s Cathedral, Kildare … Victorian critics said George Edmund Street’s restoration had spoilt ‘a beautiful ruin’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

While I was visiting Co Kildare at the weekend, I spent some time visiting the Cathedral Church of Saint Brigid, one of two cathedrals in the United Dioceses of Meath and Kildare in the Church of Ireland.

I had been invited by Archbishop Richard Clarke, then Bishop of Meath and Kildare, to preach in the cathedral in 2011 at the ordination to the priesthood of Paul Bogle, now the Dean of Clonmacmoise. But my visit on Friday was my first opportunity to spend some extra time in the cathedral, exploring its history, architecture and heritage.

Saint Brigid is one of the three patrons of Ireland, alongside Saint Patrick and Saint Columba. She is said to have lived at Faughart, near Dundalk, Co Louth, and that she arrived in Kildare with her followers in the late fifth century, perhaps in the year 480. She was assisted in the rule of her house by an abbot or bishop named Condleth.

Saint Condleth may have died in the year 520 and Saint Brigid in 523. For many centuries, Kildare maintained a unique Irish experiment: the abbess ruled over a double community of women and men, with an abbess, and abbot and a bishop. The original abbey church may have been a simple wooden building in the sixth century.

An effigy in Saint Brigid’s Cathedral said to be Bishop Ralph of Bristol (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The cathedral was devastated perhaps 16 times between the years 835 and 998, and Kildare declined in importance from the 12th century. When the Anglo-Norman Ralph of Bristol was Bishop of Kildare in 1223-1232, he found the cathedral was virtually in ruins, and began rebuilding it.

The cathedral was enlarged and embellished in 1482, but later bishops paid less attention to the building. It may have been semi-ruinous by 1500, and it fell into disrepair in the 16th century after the Reformation. The roof was pulled down and parts of the chancel, tower and north transept collapsed, and Bishop Alexander Craik (1560-1574) sold the cathedral manors and lands for cash.

The bishop’s throne in Saint Brigid’s Cathedral, Kildare (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Bishop William Pilsworth (1604-1635) found the cathedral was ruined when he arrived in the diocese, and he failed to recover the lands sold off in the previous century by Bishop Craik. During the Irish Confederate Wars in the mid-17th century, the central tower and the north transept were severely damaged in a military attack, the chancel, nave and south transept were left roofless, and the cathedral was derelict by 1649.

After the restoration, Bishop Thomas Price (1661-1667) refused to spend anything on rebuilding the cathedral, although later it was partially rebuilt in 1686 by Bishop William Moreton (1682-1705), who was also Dean of Christ church Cathedral, Dublin, rebuilt the chancel and had it consecrated for use as a cathedral.

But the building continued to deteriorate and decay. The west wall of the nave was still standing in 1738, but it too had fallen by the mid-19th century, when it was replaced by a modern wall.

Inside Saint Brigid’s Cathedral, Kildare, looking east (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The fabric of the cathedral was in such a condition by the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 that there were proposals. Instead, however, a complete restoration of the building was carried out by George Edmund Street (1824-1881). He started working there in 1875, and this work continued after his death in 1881 until it was completed by James Franklin Fuller (1835-1924) in 1896.

The late Victorian restoration by Street and Fuller included a new north transept, new chancel, and new west wall as well as rebuilding three sides of the square tower. A new oak roof, supported on stone corbels, was built into the wall buttresses.

The restored cathedral was consecrated on 22 September 1896 by Archbishop Plunket of Dublin, who was also Bishop of Kildare. The sermon was preached by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward Benson, who died three weeks later.

More recent restorations have included new internal porches, repairs to the internal and external stonework and rebuilding the organ.

Inside Saint Brigid’s Cathedral, Kildare, looking west (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The cathedral is an imposing building but is primarily of late 19th century construction, incorporating the fabric of the 13th century church and later reconstructions. The cathedral is built in the Gothic Revival style and successfully incorporates the earlier fabric to such a degree that it is difficult to distinguish between the various phases of construction.

It has a six-bay, double-height nave with single-bay, double-height north and south transepts, a two-bay double-height chancel at the east end, and a single-bay, three-stage tower at the crossing on a square plan with a battlemented roof and a parapet wall.

The cathedral is built in rubble stone with cut-stone dressings and is a fine example of the high quality of stone masonry traditionally practised in the area. This is seen especially in the carved detailing, including the surrounds to the doors and windows and its decorative motifs such as gargoyles to the parapet walls.

An unusual mediaeval ‘indulgenced’ carving in Kildare Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The exterior retains most of its original features and materials, while replacement fabric has been installed in keeping with the original integrity of the building.

The cathedral is cruciform in plan without aisles in the early Gothic style with a massive square central tower. All the windows are lancet windows, singles or doubles, but triple lancets in the four gables.

The design features include arches that span from buttress to buttress in advance of the side walls. The parapets are of the stepped Irish type. They have been much restored, but probably date from about 1395, when a Papal relaxation was given to those who visited Kildare and gave alms for the conservation of the church.

The chancel and high altar in Saint Brigid’s Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Inside, the cathedral is plain, the window splays are not moulded, but the rear-arches are moulded and spring from shafts with moulded capitals. These shafts are short and terminate in small curved tails. The construction of the lancet arches at the crossing, which have retained their original shape, together with the exposed timber roof construction, are also worth noting.

The altar tomb of Bishop Walter Wellesley in the south transept (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The cathedral has a rich collection of carved cross slabs, grave slabs, effigies, tombs a decorative tiled floor, stained glass windows and an ornate reredos and arcading by Fuller in the chancel.

One of the most striking features is the altar tomb of Walter Wellesley, Bishop of Kildare, who died in 1539. This altar tomb is an example of 16th century sculpture and was originally at Great Connell Priory. It was moved to the cathedral in 1971 for preservation.

The cost of restoring the tomb was largely funded by the Duke of Wellington on behalf of the Wellesley family.

Christ the Man of Sorrows (‘Ecce Homo’) on a panel on the altar tomb of Bishop Walter Wellesley (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

An effigy of the bishop lies on the mensa or top piece. At each end are carvings of Christ the Man of Sorrows (Ecce Homo) surrounded by instruments of the passion, and the Crucifixion with images of the Virgin Mary and Saint John; on the sides are some remaining figures of apostles and saints.

The crucifixion depicted on a panel on the tomb of Bishop Walter Wellesley (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

On the underside of the mensa is a small but stunning female exhibitionist figure. It is often referred to as a sheela-na-gig.

A hidden image on the tomb of Bishop Walter Wellesley is said to be a ‘sheela-na-gig’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The chapter and choir stalls are of solid oak, with acorn and oak leaf carvings.

Also worth seeing are the Bishop’s throne, the carved Caen Stone pulpit with carvings of the four evangelists and Irish marble columns (1887), the brass eagle lectern (1896) and the organ built by Conacher in 1898.

The chapter stalls and pulpit in Kildare Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

A font made of solid granite is said locally to have been the font in which Saint Laurence O’Toole was baptised in 1123.

The font in which Saint Laurence O’Toole is said to have been baptised (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The east window above the high altar is a memorial to Dr Samuel Chaplin (1829-1891), the Kildare county surgeon who played a crucial role in the cathedral restoration.

The west window is dedicated to the three patrons of Ireland and is a memorial to Archbishop Edward Benson of Canterbury (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The west window is dedicated to the three patrons of Ireland, Saint Patrick, Saint Brigid and Saint Columba, and is a memorial to Archbishop Edward Benson of Canterbury, who preached at the consecration of the cathedral in 1896.

The stained glass window of Saint Luke (1974) by the Czech artist Gerda Schurmann is a memorial to George Frederick Graham, Dean of Kildare (1938-1952).

Christ in Majesty in the window in the Lady Chapel (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The north transept, known as the Lady Chapel, has a modern window depicting (from left) Saint Paul, Christ in Majesty and Saint Peter.

The round tower to the north-east of the cathedral dates from 1150 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

To the north-east the cathedral is one of five round towers in Co Kildare. At 33 metres, it is the second highest in Ireland, and is open to visitors to climb. It is built of Wicklow granite and local limestone. It dates from ca1150, which is comparatively late for an Irish Round Tower, although it may have replaced an earlier tower.

The high cross in the grounds of the cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The plain granite high cross in the grounds of the cathedral is 3 metres tall with a damaged ringed head and a tapering shaft mounted on a square base. Because it lacks decoration, this High Cross is difficult to date. The base is massive for such a slender shaft and head and may not be the original.

According to local lore, Saint Brigid’s Fire was kept alight in an ancient oratory known as Saint Brigid’s Fire House. The shape of this oratory and the thickness of the remains of the walls and foundations are evidence of its antiquity.

To the south-east of the cathedral, a disused burial chamber is known locally as ‘Saint Brigid’s Kitchen.’

Some critics 19th century critics said Street’s restoration had spoilt ‘a beautiful ruin.’ But without Street, Kildare might have no cathedral today.

Until 1846, the Deans of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, were also Bishops of Kildare. The Diocese of Kildare was united with Dublin in 1846, and since 1976 Kildare has been united with the Diocese of Meath.

Saint Brigid’s Cathedral, Kildare … one of the two cathedrals in the United Dioceses of Meath and Kildare (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)