Ledwithstown, Ballymahon, County Longford 

Mark Bence-Jones. A Guide to Irish Country Houses (originally published as Burke’s Guide to Country Houses volume 1 Ireland by Burke’s Peerage Ltd. 1978); Revised edition 1988 Constable and Company Ltd, London.

p. 183. “A very perfect small early C18 house of two storeys over high basement, possibly by Richard Castle. Three bay front, tripartite doorway with pediment extending over door and side-lights, on pilaters which stand on miniature rusticated basements; broad flight of steps to hall door. Solid roof parapet; windows surrounds with keystones; bold quoins. Symmetrical rear elevation, wiht blocking round windows and central basement door. Deep hall with chimneypiece of black Kilkenny marble. Plaster panelling in ground floor rooms, with occasional shell and other ornament; wood panelling upstairs. Seat of the Ledwiths, became derelict, now being restored.” 

https://www.igs.ie/conservation/project/ledwithstown-house-co-longford

Ledwithstown House, Co. Longford

The design of Ledwithstown House has been attributed to Richard Castle, or Cassels, an architect who, in 1728, came to Ireland, from the city of Kassel in northern Hesse, Germany. Castle came at the invitation of Sir Gustavus Hume, of Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, and over the course of a long and successful career designed many buildings, including the Printing House in Trinity College, the Conolly Folly, Leinster House, and Russborough House in Co. Wicklow. Castle also has a number of lesser-known houses attributed to him, including Ledwithstown in Co. Longford. With its Doric temple portico surrounding the entrance door, the exterior of Ledwithstown is plain, almost severe. There is no pretty semi-circular fanlight here; instead three plain squares of glass, and two windows flanking the entrance door that provide light to the hallway. Although relatively small, the windows on the façade are surrounded by heavy stone frames, making them appear larger. Thick glazing bars reinforce the early eighteenth-century character of this house. The attribution to Richard Castle is reasonable, as is the date 1746. All the architectural components have been carefully considered, and a sense of proportion—a term often over-used in relation to eighteenth-century architecture—infuses every element, up to and including the two chimney stacks, which are arranged parallel to the façade. The roof is partly concealed by an elaborate cornice, adding to the Palladian grandeur. The severity of Ledwithstown’s temple front, with its plain pilasters and rusticated base, is relieved by a Baroque flourish of balustrade and steps that lead to the entrance door. Other country houses by, or attributed to Castle include Hazelwood in Co. Sligo and Bellinter House in Co. Meath.

IGS Grants — 2001: repairs to interior decorative plasterwork; 2006: restoration of panelled rooms

The work of the Irish Georgian Society is supported through the Heritage Council’s ‘Heritage Capacity Fund 2022’.

https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/buildings-search/building/13402217/ledwithstown-house-ledwithstown-co-longford

Detached three-bay two-storey over raised basement house, built 1746. Hipped natural slate roof hidden behind parapet wall with pronounced moulded cut stone eaves course and with cut stone coping over. Pair of tall dressed ashlar limestone chimneystacks, aligned along with roof ridge, having moulded cut stone coping over. Sections of cast-iron rainwater goods remain, cast-iron hopper dated 1857. Roughcast rendered walls over rubble stone construction; cut stone block-and-start quoins to the corners and chamfered cut stone string course above basement level. Square-headed window openings with replacement nine-over-six pane timber sliding sash windows having cut limestone surrounds with architraves and prominent keystone, and with tooled limestone sills. Central cut stone tripartite Tuscan doorcase to main elevation (south) comprising tetrastyle limestone pilasters resting on rusticated ashlar limestone base section and surmounted by carved pediment. Timber panelled door with overlight and having flanking six-over-four pane timber sliding sidelights. Doorway accessed by flight of moulded cut stone steps flanked to either side (east and west) by splayed rendered walls with cut stone coping over and having terminating cut stone piers (on square-plan) to base with moulded capstones over. Square-headed door opening to the east elevation having cut limestone block-and-start surround with prominent keystone, replacement timber door and a plain overlight. Set back from road in extensive mature grounds to the rural landscape to the south of Keenagh and to the northwest of Ballymahon. Long straight approach avenue to house from the south. Gateway to the south comprising a pair of dressed ashlar limestone gate piers (on square-plan) having moulded plinths and stepped capstones with moulded cornice detail. Single-bay single-storey outbuilding to the southeast of house having rubble stone walls and pitched corrugated-metal roof. Rubbles stone boundary walls to road-frontage and to site. 

Appraisal 

This sophisticated middle-sized house is one of the most important elements of the architectural heritage of County Longford. Its design has been attributed to the eminent architect Richard Castle (died 1751) who was probably the foremost architect working in Ireland at the time of construction and has been credited with the dissemination of the Palladian architectural style throughout rural Ireland. Ledwithstown House has quite a robust appearance on account of the heavy parapet with pronounced eaves cornice and by the large tall ashlar chimneystacks that are aligned along with the front elevation. Although built using rubble stone masonry, this building is well-detailed with high quality, if robust, cut limestone trim in features like the window surrounds and the heavy eaves cornice. The good-quality dressed limestone quoins to the corners help to emphasise the stocky appearance of this building. The fine Tripartite doorcase with pediment is strongly detailed and provides a central focus to the main elevation. This central focus is further enhanced by the flight of cut stone steps with flanking walls having splayed bases. The house is further enhance by its long and straight drive aligned with the centre of the front elevation, which creates a sense of grandeur and generates a sense of anticipation when approaching the house. The well-crafted gate piers at the start of this driveway complete the setting and add substantially to this important composition. This building has been recently restored after a long period of near-derelict. Ledwithstown House was the home of the Ledwith family from its construction until c. 1900. The Ledwith family were an important in County Longford from c. 1650, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a number of family members served as Grand Jurors and as High Sheriff of the county (High Sheriffs included George Ledwith in 1764 – 5; James in 1792 – 3, Richard in 1807 and Edward in 1847 – 8). 

 
featured in Great Irish Houses. Forewards by Desmond FitgGerald, Desmond Guinness. IMAGE Publications, 2008. 

p. 200. “Ledwithstown House in the north midlands was built in 1746 by Edward Ledwith and occupied by the family until the later part of the 19^th century. Among the family members who resided there were the Reverend Palmer in the 1770s and Captain James Smyth Ledwith in the later half of the 19^th century.  

The Anglo-Norman family of Ledwith was established in County Meath as early as 1270 but the first evidence of the family in south County Longford comes in the middle of the 17^th century. Ledwithstown House is probably the work of the great German architect Richard Castle, Officer of the Engineers, who came to Ireland in 1727 to design a house for Sir Gustavus Hume in County Fermanagh. He became one of the most prominent architects in Ireland and contributed to many of the great houses of the 18^th century including Leinster House, Powerscourt and Carton. 

In 1893, William Ledwith, son of Captain James Smyth Ledwith, leased the house to Thomas Ronaldson and he purchased the property in 1903, thus ending the Ledwith family association with the house. Lawrence Feeney, grandfather of the present owner, bought the house in 1911. During the 1920s, at a time of political unrest in Ireland, Mr Feeney’s widow and family moved out the of the house. For the next six decades the house would be lived in by an assortment of family members, squatters and local eccentrics, until the Feeney family repossessed it in 1981. 

Much damage had been done over the years: parts of the roof were falling in, panelling had been removed for firewood and the windows were in a sorry state. With the assistance of the Irish Georgian Society, the owners, Edward Feeney and his wife Mary, have set about restoring and redecorating the house. “I suppose if we had known what lay in store we might never have gone near it,” Edward Feeney says, looking back on the difficulties they encountered. “But we were young and foolish and it was too beautiful a house to leave to fall into complete disrepair. Initially we wanted to just stop the rot nd keep the weather out of the house. Our approach was to take it one step at a time.” 

Today the estate has shrunk to 200 acres, having swelled to 2,500 in the middle of the 18^th century, yet the family continue to farm the land. They have kept the house as close to the original as possible. “The house is so well designed that there wouldn’t be much point making changes,” says Mary Feeney. “We have always loved the proportions of the house.” 

Edward Feeney adds, “Structurally it’s quite modest but it has a typical Castle entrance and a very well-planned layout. We are not certain that Castle was the designer, but the overall structure and the black Kilkenny marble fireplaces would seem to confirm his hand at work. Also, several other houses he worked on at the time, including Belvedere in Mullingar, are not all that far from Ledwithstown. So it’s entirely possible.” 

The entrance hall was last decorated in the 1850s. The cornice had to be replaced over the main door and much work was done on the ceilings. Conservation expert Mary McGrath also worked on the colour schemes, and a pale grey thought to be the original colouring was found on the panelling and window and door surrounds. McGrath explains: “In the summertime the door was probably open all the time and in the winter there would have been a fire in the hearth. So of all of the rooms of the house, the hallway was probably painted most often. All of the early coats would have been distemper and as the procedure was to dust off the loose paint and to wash down the walls, it is difficult to be certain about the full sequence of colours.” 

[p. 203] “The black Kilkenny marble fireplace in the hall is original and has a black shell motif. Much of the original contents of the house had been sold during an auction in 1911, with the remainder dispersed during subsequent decades. Almost all the furniture has been brought into the house over the last two decades, including a family piano, which stands in front of the fireplace. 

The breakfast room contains a fine 1859 Italian marble fireplace. Consultant historic buildings conservator Richard Ireland, who was responsible for the restoration of the surfaces of Castletown, underpinned the remaining plasterwork on the ceiling of this room in 2002. George o’Malley, who is based in County Wicklow, worked on the plasterwork with his father, Tom, who came out of retirement ages 82 to work at Ledwithstown. 

When the current owners took over the house, a large tree was growing in the centre of the drawing room and out through the roof. Today the room has been beautifully restored. A local craftsman, who copied a surviving example, replaced the shuttering. The fireplace is not original and dates to sometime in the 1860s. The chandelier was a choice of the owners and the sofas were all bought in Ireland. Many of the pieces of furniture, including a fine Irish table, were bought at auction. 

While oil heating has been installed, the family may convert to wood pellets to reduce energy costs. The rooms are modest in scale – the ceilings not quite as high as many Irish country houses of similar scale – so the house is already relatively efficient. 

A “Marrakech” red has been chosen for the dining room, which also has a Kilkenny marble fireplace. The table was bought at an auction in Birr. The library, which has a fireplace taken from upstairs, contains some of the few pieces of original furniture including the bookcase and a round circular table. A local dealer told Edward Feeney’s mother that the table, then stored in a nearby hen house, had come out of the house during the auction in 1911. The table was purchased for £4.50 

The green bedroom upstairs which has fine wood panelling and a shell motif Kilkenny marble fireplace. The Georgian cream coloured curtains offset the green of the walls. In the master bedroom the wood panelling is being restored by local craftsman Coleman Lovett and an adjacent powder room is being converted into an en suite bathroom. Edward and Mary’s dedication to the restoration of this house and its historic gardens will ensure that Ledwithstown rightfully takes its place as one of Ireland’s great houses.” 

Casey, Christine and Alistair Rowan. The Buildings of Ireland: North Leinster. Penguin Books, London, 1993.  

p. 142 

http://visitlongford.ie/listings/ledwithstown-house/ 

Ledwithstown House is a handsome Georgian country house, situated outside the town of Ballymahon, and has been described as a “miniature gem” by architectural historians. 

It is believed to have been designed c.1730 by the eminent architect Richard Castle, who died in 1751. Castle, or Cassels, was probably the foremost architect in Ireland at the time of construction and was one of the greatest proponents of Palladian architecture in Ireland. 

His domestic villas were strongly influenced by the designs of Italian architect Andrea Palladio, who designed elegant, symmetrical houses with classical details inspired by the architecture of ancient Rome. 

Ledwithstown House has solid, robust appearance with a pleasing symmetrical design, typical of Palladian villas. It features finely-carved cut limestone trim, such as the window surrounds and the heavy eaves cornice that runs along the top of the walls. 

The good-quality dressed limestone quoins to the corners help to emphasise the stocky appearance of this building. The doorcase is especially attractive and provides a central focus to the main elevation, and is further enhanced by the flight of stone steps to its base. 

The house has undergone an extensive programme of conservation and renovation by the present owners from the 1970s onwards, with support of agencies such as the Irish Georgian Society (www.igs.ie). 

Ledwithstown House was the residence of the Ledwith family from its construction to around 1900. The Ledwith family were an important family in County Longford from 1650 onwards. Successive generations of family members served in public office as grand jurors, or as high sheriff of the county, including George Ledwith who was the high sheriff in 1764; James Ledwith in 1792, Richard in 1807 and Edward in 1847. 

Ledwithstown House is privately owned by the Feeney family. 

‘The townland, and chief part of the demesne of Ledwithstown, are in this parish (Shruel), though the dwelling house and offices are in the parish of Kilcommack. It has been long the residence of a respectable family of the name of Ledwith, who possess a considerable property in this neighbourhood.’ A Statistical Account, or Parochial Survey, of Ireland, 1819. 
In 1976 Maurice Craig wrote of Ledwithstown, County Longford, ‘there can be few houses of its size in Ireland more thoroughly designed, and with internal decoration so well integrated.’ The house has long been attributed to Richard Castle and is one of three such properties considered to have been designed by the architect, the other two being Gaulstown, County Westmeath (see Gallia Urba est Omnis Divisa in Partes Tres, February 24^th 2014) and Whitewood Lodge, County Meath (see An Appalling Vista, February 9^th last). In their form and composition this triumvirate demonstrates a steadily growing assurance, with Ledwithstown displaying by far the greatest sophistication and thus inclining to the idea that it was the latest, probably dating from the second half of the 1740s (Castle died in 1751). Relatively little is known of the building’s history, other than that until 1911 it was owned, although not always occupied, by the Ledwith family who settled in the area around 1650. Members of that now-vanished class, the gentry, the Ledwiths played their part in local society as Grand Jurors and High Sheriffs but otherwise came little to public notice. The same is true of their former home, which despite its considerable charm, can be passed unnoticed on the public highway: again like Gaulstown and Whitewood, Ledwithstown lies at the end of an exceptionally long, straight drive. 

As with Gaulstown and Whitewood, Ledwithstown is a three-bay house of two storeys over a semi-raised basement. With all three the main entrance is approached by a flight of stone steps; in this instance, the supporting walls splay out to create the impression of a ceremonial approach to the door. In the case of the other two properties, the doorcase is relatively plain, of cut limestone with a fanlight (that at Gaulstown also has side lights). Ledwithstown’s south-facing doorcase is altogether more elaborate, a cut-stone tripartite Tuscan design incorporating tetrastyle pilasters resting on rusticated base and surmounted by carved pediment. Such an entrance immediately indicates this is a building with greater aspirations than those of its siblings. In other respects, however, the facade of Ledwithstown is closer in spirit to Whitewood than to Gaulstown, sharing the same heavy parapet wall concealing the greater part of a slated roof with a pair of substantial chimneystacks (those at Gaulstown are at either gable end). Likewise Ledwithstown and Whitewood have raised corner quoins which add further gravitas to the building, the most striking differences between the two being that Whitewood’s facade is of cut stone (as opposed to roughcast render over rubble stone) and Ledwithstown’s first floor fifteen-pane sash windows share the same proportions as those one storey below (their equivalents at Whitewood are smaller). 

The interior design and decoration of Ledwithstown is much more elaborate than either of the two houses with which it bears comparison. Although measuring just forty-eight by forty-seven feet, it can be considered a country house in miniature, the layout being identical to that found in many larger properties. There are, for example, two staircases, that to the west, of carved wood, serving only the ground and first floors while secondary service stairs of stone to the east also descend to the basement area. Immediately inside the entrance hall are doors to left and right providing access to the former morning room and study; a matching pair to the rear open to the staircases while one in the centre of the back wall leads to the drawing room. Here and in the adjacent dining room, the walls retain their mid-18^th century plaster panelling, that in the drawing room being especially fine with a combination of lugged and round topped panels topped by swags or baskets of fruit and shells. Similarly the main staircase, lit by a round-topped window, has timber wainscoting and leads to a panelled first floor landing with egg-and-dart and dentil cornicing; one of the rooms on this level is entirely panelled in wood and others still contain their shallow limestone chimney pieces. The basement likewise keeps much of its original character with a sequence of rooms opening off a central stone-flagged and vaulted central passage. 

In 1911 Ledwithstown was bought from the original family by Laurence Feeney. However, following his premature death just six years later, the house was let to a variety of tenants none of whom took care of the property; seemingly a brother and sister who lived there for a while removed all the door and shutter knobs, while another family allowed the chimneys to become blocked and then knocked holes in the walls to permit smoke escape. In 1976 Maurice Craig described Ledwithstown as being ‘unhappily in an advanced state of dilapidation, perhaps not beyond recovery’ and two years later Mark Bence-Jones wrote that the place was ‘now derelict.’ However, around this time the original Laurence Feeney’s grandson, likewise called Laurence, married and he and his wife Mary began to consider the possibility of restoring Ledwithstown. 
The couple, together with their children, initiated work on the house and in 1982 they were visited by Desmond Guinness. Soon afterwards the Irish Georgian Society offered its first grant to Ledwithstown, the money being put towards replacing the roof. Further financial aid from the IGS followed, along with voluntary work parties to help the Feeneys in their enterprise. By 1987 Ledwithstown had a new roof and parapet and was once more watertight. Inevitably sections of the reception rooms’ plaster panelling and other decoration had been lost to damp, but enough remained for it to be copied and replaced. The same was true of the main stair hall and sections of the first floor wood panelling, all of which was gradually replaced: when new floors were installed on this level in 1990 surviving panelled walls had to be suspended in mid-air to facilitate the removal of decayed boards. Ledwithstown demonstrates that even the most rundown building can be saved provided the task is approached with enough commitment. Today, more than thirty years after they embarked on their mission, the Feeneys remain happily living in what is, above all else, a family home. So too are both Gaulstown and Whitewood Lodge, making this another trait all three houses share.