A Future for Irish Historic Houses - Irish Heritage Trust

gardens to service the families’ needs; ornamental gardens intricately designed and
laid out for leisure purposes; woodland for privacy, the rearing of game and
commercial use; parkland for the grazing of cattle; and a wide variety of outoffices for
the housing of animals or for the use of estate employees such as gardeners, masons
and carpenters.
Similarly, in their time, the town houses of Aldborough, Charlemont, Ely and Tyrone
were amongst the grandest and most important houses in the city. They, too, were
situated in extensive surroundings. Aldborough, for example, is regarded as the last
great mansion to have been built in Dublin during its golden age in the second half of
the eighteenth century. The scale and grandeur of the house and the size of its original
gardens are said to have been unprecedented.
To embellish their homes, Irish landlords toured the continent purchasing furniture
and works of art. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Irish houses benefited
from the increased impoverishment of the continental aristocracy. ‘Bargains’ were
acquired in France, Italy, Poland, Germany, Russia and elsewhere, so that Irish houses
became the repositories of fine art collections, silver, tapestries, china, porcelain,
glass, furniture and so on. Until the early 1880s at least, heirlooms were settled to
prevent heirs from selling them off, so that most houses were cluttered with valuable
contents.
The late 1870s initiated the decline of Irish landed estates and simultaneously historic
houses. The reasons for this decline have already been set out by the author of this
report in a book entitled, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland (2001). An
overview will suffice here.
From the mid-1850s, when the economy began to recover from the calamitous effects
of the Great Famine, most Irish landlords indulged in a spending spree on the
remodelling or embellishment of their existing houses and demesnes. They borrowed
very heavily on the collateral strength of their estates. Many of these landlords had
already inherited substantial debts from their ancestors but the booming economy that
characterised most of the period from around 1853 to 1877 gave rise to a great deal of
optimism that agricultural rents would in the future continue to sustain the repayment
of debts and charges and the maintenance of opulent and leisured lifestyles for
landlords.
However, this sense of optimism was misplaced. From the early 1880s, the political,
economic and social decline of the landlord class coincided with the rise of the Land
League and the Home Rule movements. The coincidence of economic depression,
Land League agitation and government intervention in the fixing of ‘fair rents’ (which
invariably meant lower rents) after the introduction of the 1881 Land Act led to a
rather dramatic decline in rental income. The Settled Land Act of 1882 acknowledged
the need of landlords to sell off their heirlooms in order to meet their charges. The
passing of this act began the process of stripping Irish houses of their valuable
contents. It was a process that was to continue during the remainder of the nineteenth
and most of the twentieth centuries.
As levels of indebtedness increased from the early 1880s, many landlords began to
sell off parts of their landed estates particularly their outlying estates that were located
10