Catherine FitzGerald and Dominic West's home in
Ireland
Catherine FitzGerald and her husband Dominic West have
rescued her family home, Glin Castle in Ireland, from being sold, and made it
into a viable commercial concern.
By Emily
Tobin
17 March
2022
https://www.houseandgarden.co.uk/gallery/dominic-west-catherine-fitzgerald-home-glin-castle
Irish
folklore is rich with tremendous stories of mythical creatures, brave warriors
and celebrated heroes. There is the monster that swims in the depths of the
River Shannon – with its horse’s mane, gleaming eyes, nails of iron and whale’s
tail. There is the sixteenth-century Black Knight of Glin, whose distraught
mother – according to legend – drank the blood from his severed head after his
execution in Limerick. More recently, there is the Hollywood actor who married
the heiress to a handsome castle.
For more
than 700 years the Knights of Glin have lived near the Shannon. Theirs is a
tale of tenacity – the FitzGerald family survived the Desmond rebellions of the
sixteenth century, the Cromwellian and Jacobite wars, famine and the Penal
Laws. Later there was debt, debauchery and bankruptcy, but they hung on. In
1601, British troops besieged the old castle, kidnapped the Knight’s son and
tied him to the mouth of a cannon. He would be blown to smithereens if his
father did not surrender. The Knight shouted back in Gaelic, ‘I am virile, my
wife is fertile and there are plenty more where he came from!’ Luckily, the boy
managed to escape.
By the late
seventeenth century, the old castle had been abandoned and the FitzGeralds
moved into a thatched longhouse overlooking the Shannon. In the 1780s, John
Bateman Fitzgerald, the 23rd Knight of Glin, married Margaretta Maria Fraunceis
Gwyn, a wealthy heiress whose father owned Forde Abbey in Somerset. This
provided temporary respite from the family’s declining fortunes. The couple
planned and built the present castle, a splendid neoclassical building, with
the longhouse forming the west wing. The new house boasted delicate plasterwork
ceilings, Corinthian columns, and an elegant flying staircase lit by a
beautiful Venetian window. By all accounts, the end of the eighteenth century
was a golden moment for Glin. The FitzGeralds threw magnificent dances both at
the house and on their yacht moored on the Shannon, where the family bard
narrated lengthy tales in praise of his patrons. But before long they were
bankrupt and it fell to their son John Fraunceis to replenish the family
coffers.
Nicknamed
the ‘Knight of the Women’, for reasons that will soon become apparent, John
Fraunceis added castellations, false arrow slits and mullioned windows in the
1820s, in keeping with the Gothic Revival that was sweeping the country. He
landscaped the park and oversaw the building of several follies and grottos,
designed specifically for liaisons with his mistresses, with whom he allegedly
fathered at least 15 illegitimate children – much to the disapproval of the
parish priest. He was described in local verse as ‘this hoary old sinner, this
profligate rare’.
And so the
story continues, with stretches of financial struggle interspersed with spells
of affluence. In 1923, a mob of Sinn Fein men was given short shrift by the
27th Knight. Confined to a wheelchair after a stroke, he refused to leave the
castle, bellowing at the rebels, ‘Well, you will have to burn me in it, boys.’
His wife, Lady Rachel Wyndham Quin, did much to develop the garden – planting a
cornucopia of exciting new species from South America, which still flourish in
the west coast’s mild climate.
Desmond
John Villiers FitzGerald, the 29th and final Knight of Glin, inherited the
title when he was just 12 years old. In 1975, he and his wife, Olda, moved back
to Glin from London and spent decades scouring auction houses for the pictures,
drawings and china that had been sold in leaner times. A connoisseur of the
decorative arts, a curator at the V&A, the Ireland representative for
Christie’s and the president of the Irish Georgian Society, Desmond worked
tirelessly to save his own inheritance and also did the same for architectural
treasures across Ireland. In the age of Bungalow Bliss – the 1970 book by Irish
architect Jack Fitzsimons, which became synonymous with the suburbanisation of
the Irish countryside – Desmond’s work was vital. His daughter, Catherine, the
current chatelaine of Glin Castle, describes him as ‘an enthusiast, an
encourager and an aesthete’.
Under Olda
and Desmond, the castle played host to a glittering cast of rock stars, poets,
writers, artists and Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Church of Ireland clerics dined
with Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Talitha Getty and the poet Seamus Heaney.
Paddy Moloney, of The Chieftains, played his tin whistle in the Grand Hall and
Ronnie Wood was a guest at one of Catherine’s birthday parties.
In 1993, the decision was made to turn the house into
a hotel.
The family
converted the attic rooms into a further six bedrooms, making a total of 15 for
the guests to use. Olda revived the walled kitchen garden. But, with the impact
of the financial crash reverberating across Ireland and Americans no longer
visiting, Olda and Desmond were forced to close the business in 2008. Three
years later, the 29th Knight died and, without a male heir to inherit the
title, the hereditary knighthood was extinguished.
In 2015,
Olda and her three daughters made the painful decision to sell the house and
lands that had been in their family for seven centuries. An auction, held at
Christie’s, of furniture and art from Desmond’s collection raised a large sum,
but the house was no longer financially viable. There was interest from buyers
abroad and at home, but none was deemed quite right. For two years, Glin’s fate
hung in the balance, until the decision was made to take the house off the
market. Catherine and her husband, actor Dominic West, committed to making the
castle a going concern. ‘The house has its own spirit, which won’t let us out
of its grasp,’ says Catherine.
‘The story
of this place is so romantic and so melancholy,’ adds Dominic. ‘With the sale
of the house, I realised I was asking Catherine to give up her soul. She has
devoted 20 years to the garden. It’s at the core of her being.’ Catherine has
carved out a career as a successful landscape designer and is currently
reviving the gardens at Hillsborough Castle. She says of Glin, ‘Growing up, my
sisters and I roamed the place, making dens in the rhododendron bushes,
climbing the Monterey pine and wading in the rushing, stony stream. The garden
got under my skin – and for years it’s filled my dreams.’
Dominic
first visited Glin for Catherine’s 21st birthday party, an experience he
describes as ‘romantically full of turmoil’. Having hitched a ride from
Limerick, he was swiftly introduced to several of Catherine’s other boyfriends.
The pair fell in love at Trinity College, Dublin. Their paths crossed again
many years later and they were married at Glin in 2010. ‘The wedding was a real
hoolie,’ Dominic says. ‘The whole village was involved, with Thomas Coolahan,
the publican, postman and funeral director, running the bar with gusto.’
The
longstanding relationship between the village and the castle is central to this
story. Glin is a beacon of culture and employment in the local economy. The
house is now open for private lettings and events, with regular literature and
cooking retreats by local foodies, Imen McDonnell and Cliodhna Prendergast, who
founded Lens & Larder. Their recipes can be seen in ‘Castle Kitchen’ later
in this issue. The castle is once again flourishing, with an array of guests
filling its rooms. In May next year it will host the Rare and Special Plant
Fair organised by Bord Bia (the Irish Food Board) and there are also plans to
run gardening weekend retreats.
Molly
Keane, the caustic chronicler of the lost Anglo-Irish world, and a frequent
guest at Glin, noted the differences between English and Irish country houses.
She is quoted in The Irish Home by Ianthe Ruthven as saying that English houses
‘have an air of blessed permanence. They sit low in their wooded valleys,
comfortable as cups in saucers.’ While their Irish counterparts ‘are ethereal
in their uselessness… their designers yielded to one object only – beauty’.
Glin is
certainly beautiful, but to call it useless is to ignore the impact it has had
on the FitzGerald family. ‘Glin enriches my life and my kids’ lives in terms of
identity and continuum,’ explains Dominic. ‘My children are surrounded by Irish
wit and humanity. They have a far broader existence than they would anywhere
else in the world.’ Generation after generation of the FitzGerald family has
added to Glin, each in its own way – preserving and contributing to the
castle’s beauty and never striking a wrong note.
No comments:
Post a Comment