Irish Fortified Houses

A Cabinet of Curiosities

The forerunners of the museums that we visit today were known as ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’. Starting – just about – at the very end of the sixteenth century – we find mentioned and illustrated collections of objects gathered from exotic places: things that a gentleman might be unfamiliar with; things that could expand our knowledge and cause wonder. Curiosities, undoubtedly. Here’s one collection illustrated in 1599:

This is an engraving from Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’Historia Naturale (Naples 1599), the earliest illustration of a ‘natural history cabinet’ (courtesy Oxford University). It shows a room fitted out to display imported paraphernalia: (hopefully mounted) creatures, dried specimens, fossils – also books and illustrations. The collector here takes on the role of educator – perhaps showman. Here you might encounter unicorn horns, a dragon’s blood, mermaid scales as well as the full sized alligator hanging from the ceiling.

Frans Francken the Younger, Chamber of Art and Curiosities, 1636 above (Public Domain). Another selection of paintings intermixed with fish, carved beads, sculptures, with on the table exotic shells, gem-stones mounted with pearls, coins and medals.

Rathfarnham Castle (above) is a good example of an Irish Fortified Manor House. This mainly seventeenth century building type would have been the relatively comfortable home of an aspiring clan – perhaps a titled family with church or merchant connections: Finola has written about a West Cork example. Austin Cooper – a tax collector who indulged his hobbies of sketching and writing while travelling through Ireland in the performance of his duties – wrote of Rathfarnham:

. . . What renders this a Place of any Note is the Cas. belonging to the E. of Ely. This Cas. is square, with a large square Tower at each corner – on the S. side in the Center is a semicircular Tower . . . The hall is but low, at the same time exquisitely elegant . . . The gallery is a beautiful room, at the far end is a curious cabinet of Tortoise Shell & Brass containing some most extraordinary Work in Ivory . . .

Austin Cooper’s Notes, rathfarnham Castle

Rathfarnham Castle has, in modern times, a distinguished continuing association with contemporary ceramicists and in 2015 established a modern Cabinet of Curiosities which continues the tradition of displaying ‘extraordinary work’, and provides excellent material for a Sunday morning post!

The curiosities are not labelled – and nor are their creators. Peter Bagshaw, OPW at Rathfarnham, has kindly provided me with a list – thank you, Peter – attached at the end of this piece. I cannot necessarily individually identify each item: I will leave you to work out which might be which . . .

This eye-pot looks great when you pan out a bit . . .

This one certainly harks back to some of those manufactured creatures that turned up in cabinets of old.

Leather teapot – a fashion item, perhaps?

I think the final image might be my favourite: a young person clutching an angel’s wing? Could this be The Sequestrator?

List of pieces – not in any order:

The Sequestrator Roderick Bamford, Australia

Mosaic Parrot Fish Ilona Romule, Latvia

N.K. Red Lizard Cup Robert Harrison, USA

New Leather Teapot Xiaoming Shi, China

Eyes Tea Verne Funk, USA

Figure Leo Tavella, Argentina

All that promise Ting Ju Shao, Taiwan

Immigration Emilia Chirila, Romania

Black and White Rotation Sylvia Nagy, USA

Fortified Manor Houses in West Cork – a Tudor Status Symbol

Coppinger's Court, Ballyvireeen, near Rosscarbery

Fortified houses are a distinctly Irish phenomenon. The Tudor period in Britain ushered in a great era of manor house building with many distinctive features. But England was a peaceful place – the owners of these great houses did not expect to be attacked. Tudor Ireland was a very different environment: life was still dangerous and conflict between the native Irish and the planter class, or between Irish clans, was common.

Machicolations at Coppinger's Court

Fortifications at Coppinger’s Court – projecting machicolations

Up to the end of the 16th century the castle/tower house was the residence of choice of the powerful – a tall stone keep mainly focused on defensive features and horribly uncomfortable to live in. (See Illustrating the Tower House for a complete run-down on tower houses.) The new manor houses emphasised the horizontal rather than the vertical, and were built with comfort in mind. However, they incorporated some of the defensive features of the tower houses – they were “fashionable but defendable.”

Mullioned windows

While tower house windows were notoriously tiny, they became much larger in the new manor houses

In Ireland they represented

a public display of power and wealth…[and] a long-term investment in their owner’s regional future and were monuments to an aspiration for an English and Continental house style suited to local Irish conditions. On a basic level the construction of a fortified house represented the owners’ desire to modernise and Anglicize.

This quote and much of the information that follows are taken from The Fortified Houses of County Cork: Origin, Fabric, Form, Function and Social Use of Space, by Joe Nunan, who has generously made it and related material available on his website.

Gun loop at ground floor level, Coppinger's Court

At Coppinger’s Court, a small gun loop in the wall among the large windows

Fortified houses were built of stone but unlike tower houses all internal floors, stairs and partitions were of wood. Defensive features included machicolations, bartizans, wall walks, gun loops, corner towers or wings to provide for flanking fire. They were built starting about 1580 up to about 1650, in a style generally known as Elizabethan.

Coppinger’s Court marooned among the fields and modern houses, near Rosscarbery. Walter Coppinger had a vision of a large settlement along the Roury River here, but it never came to fruition

There are four surviving fortified houses in West Cork (although Joe Nunan would include Baltimore Castle as well). The most impressive is Coppinger’s Court, in Ballyvireen townland near Roscarbery: indeed it is one of the most magnificent examples of this type of dwelling in Ireland. Some of the mullions remain in upper windows, and a sharp eye will spot gun loops in the outer walls. The machicolations are particularly fine, with impressive cut stone supports. This was the home of the infamous Sir Walter Coppinger, whose plan was to build a complete settlement around him in this lovely spot on the banks of the Roury River. He was a despot who got rich through clever manipulations of mortgage documents and he was said to hang his enemies from one of his windows.

The chimney on top of this wall has fallen - note the pile of stones on the ground.

The pile of stones in the foreground is the remains of a fallen chimney

The house was so awe-inspiring in its time that the legend developed that it had a window for every day of the year, a chimney for every week and a door for every month. The house was eventually attacked and ransacked in 1641 and has sat in ruins ever since. Sadly, one of the magnificent chimneys fell down in the storms of early 2014. Evidence of a bawn wall remains, with possible outdoor cooking areas.

Gearhameen - a U shaped plan

Geerhameen Fortified House, also known as Coolnalong. This view shows the U-shape design

The fortified house at Gearhameen near Durrus, built by the MacCarthy Muclaghs, provides evidence of the comfort that these new ‘castles’ provided. The household work was done on the ground floor – large kitchens contained huge fireplaces, and in this house we can see the main kitchen fireplace had a bread oven to one side and a slop hole for sweeping out leftovers to the pigs (see below), who must have been in an attached pen (the smell!).

Large ground floor fireplace with bread oven

The first and second floors have large fireplaces, with magnificent herringbone chimneys still intact (and hosting nesting choughs).

Rather than the machicolations we see at Coppinger’s Court, corbels on the outside walls probably supported wooden or stone platforms.

Corbels supported a platform for defenders

Like Coppinger’s Court, the outer walls still stand to their full height, but the loss of a keystone above one arch, and the consequent development of a large crack above it (below), bodes ill for that section of the wall.

Missing keystone

The house at Reenadisert, near Ballylickey, (below) has been built onto and within over the centuries, serving as a modified dwelling place and as farm buildings. It was the stronghold of an O’Sullivan.

It is in a very ruinous state inside – the eeriness is enhanced by an enormous crows’ nest that has fallen from inside one of the chimneys to rest on the ground. There is evidence of a basement but this cannot be accessed.

Fallen nest

A corner tower sports an impressive bartizan (corner machicolation).

That this house is still standing is something of a miracle. It is on the same land as a ruined hotel and Celtic Tiger-era abandoned housing project and I cannot find out any information about its ownership or future.

The final house (below) is at Aghadown, once home to the Becher family, and consists only of one wall with attached towers. Ivy has threatened to take over most of it – I love Leask’s description of ivy – “destructive green mantle beloved of the sentimentalist.” The house occupies high ground and once had a commanding view. Nearby are the remains of a belvedere and pleasure garden that once formed part of the demesne. Have a look at Capturing the View: Belvederes in West Cork for more on this feature of Aughadown House

Aghadown Fortified house occupies high ground with a commanding view

Through all that ivy one can make out traces of the slate that once hung on the wall above the ground floor, the outline of corbels at roof level, and a string course between the ground and first floor.

One of the Fastnet Trails goes past Aughadown House now, and there is a neat little plaque giving more information about the house and the Bechers.

Joe Nunan provides useful summations of Irish fortified houses. Among other points, he says the following:

The fortified houses built in Co. Cork had a unique Irish architectural quality and a distinct southern English look and feel; the result of contacts built up between both regions, politically through plantation-immigration and economically, through trade with the port and fishing towns of Waterford, Cork, Kinsale, Youghal and Baltimore. The social changes that took place in Tudor England were reflected in architectural form by the elites in that society and it was the latter who spearheaded the Munster plantations. They were noblemen who viewed Munster as another region within a larger England and it was through these individuals that the initial architectural influence of the many gabled, oblong country manors with circular, square, rectangular and hexagonal corner-towers was introduced into Co. Cork.

We are lucky to have these fine examples of  fortified houses in West Cork still. However, all of them  are in a perilous state of dereliction. Gearhameen’s owner has tried to stabilise the building and stave off collapse but all of them may eventually succumb to the natural ravages of time. That’s a sad thought.

An earlier version of this post was written in 2015, now edited and updated.