Townley Hall, Drogheda, County Louth 

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. 275. “(Balfour/LGI1912; Crichton, Erne, e/PB) Francis Johnston’s Classical masterpiece, just as Charleville Forest is his masterpiece in Gothic. A house “of singular and impressive austerity” in the words of Christopher Hussey [of Country Life, I believe – Jen]. Designed 1794 for Blayney Balfour. Of two storeys over a basement, with three seven bay fronts that are identical except that the entrance front has a single storey Grecian Doric portico with coupled columns; and devoid of all ornament except for a string-course and a bold cornice; deriving their beauty from perfect proportions. Parapeted roof. Entrance hall with coffered ceiling and arched recesses in the manner of Soane. Superb central rotunda, lit by glazed dome, with a wonderfully light and graceful staircase curving up inside it. Around the upper storey of his rotunda are apses, niches and arched recesses, producing an “endlessly curving movement” and an infinite variety of spatial effects; Mrs Townley Balfour, the widow of the grandson of the builder, said, after living in the house for more than thirty years, that it gave her pleasure every time she passed up and down the staircase. Large, simple rooms arranged around the central rotunda; library with lightly coffered ceiling en suite with drawing room hung with jade-green Chinese wallpaper. Kitchen wing extending along one side of yard at basement level, with windows set in deep arches and Grecian Doric columns supporting plain and massive entablatures under relieving arches. Inherited, after the death of Mrs Townley Balfour 1954, by Mr David Crichton, who sold it to Trinity College Dublin 1956.” 

https://www.countrylifeimages.co.uk/Image.aspx?id=328e12f7-7709-4207-a3b3-ed3c234f4b52&rd=2|townley||1|20|14|150

The spiral of the staircase in the central domed rotunda at Townley Hall. Not Used CL 23/07/1948 Image Number: 568918 

Image Number: 568920 

Image Number: 568917 

featured in Irish Houses and Gardens. From the Archives of Country Life. Sean O’Reilly. Aurum Press Ltd, London, 1998. 

p. 119. “The progress into the curvilinear staircase hall from the rectilinear entrance hall is indeed one of the great moments of Irish classical architecture…urged from Hussey a plaudit with which many would agree: ‘I would dare say there is nothing lovelier than this rotunda in the Georgian architecture in the British Isles.’ The contrast of sweeping curve and straight line inside the house is anticipated outside, but inversely, and only in the most subtle fashion. Here the rigid formality of the stone box of Townley is offset against rolling landscape, pitted with bulbous clumps of trees modulating the already undulating horizon.” 

p. 120 [The first floor landing is integrated with lobbies behind arches, feeding to the rooms, a variation of the Irish top-lit circulation lobby.] 

“The landscape itself is not untypical of the plains of northern Leinster’s interior, the region in which the Townley estate sits. Located near the banks of the River Boyne in Co Louth, it came to Blaney Townley-Balfour on the death of his grandfather in 1788. 

It was in the years before his marriage in 1797 to Lady Florence Cole, daughter of the 1^st Earl of Enniskillen, that the young gentleman planned and commenced a building that would come to represent a whole new phase in the history of Irish architecture. His Townley Hall, designed and built in the 1790s, could stand proudly beside the greatest house then being built in the country, Castlecoole, Co Fermanagh, situated only a county westwrard. Furthermore, being designed by a young Irish architect of obvious talent, Francis Johnston, the hew house instigated an enthusiasm for the work of native architects that would carry into the following century. 

Hussey wrote of the house’s ‘remarkable… essentially Irish classicism – as contrasted with that of the alien architects’ so often employed in Ireland. Throughout the building, austerity and structural rationalism combine to produce a style imbued with contemporary Grecian taste, but evocative too of the mood of early Christian builders in Ireland, for whom architecture was the simple expression of structural logic. 

In the staircase hall itself may be found the simple expression – however difficult the execution – of the fundamental structure of the cantilevered stone staircase. One of the great developments in Irish Georgian architecture, and well represented also in the staircase at Castletown, Co Kildare, this principle consists of stone slabs – the steps – wedged into a supporting wall, without support for their projecting ends. At Townley, Johnston takes full advantage of the slightness such a treatment will aloow to give an especially open effect in the rotunda of the staircase hall. This pure space, measuring roughly ten metres by fourteen, with coffered ceiling and panelled walls, is twisted through by the sweeping visual corkscrew of the staircase, showing how good architecture can become great. 

p. 123. Assimilated into this majestic staircase hall is a distinctively Irish arrangement, the top-lit first floor landing of the type found at Russborough. Hussey published his own schematic drawing in order to explain how the top of the staircase gave access to the first floor rooms through rectangular lobbies extending from the curved landing in the hall proper. However, he did not refer to the pattern as a development from the Irish lobby arrangement, through it might be contrasted easily with the more architectonic – if less imaginative – variant at Castlecoole. 

Johnston’s design for Townley Hall also displayed an apparently natural appreciation of progressive country house design. Outside, he eschews unnecessary ornament, and creates a buiding which rises like some classical temple directly from the ground – without the intercession of steps, area or a raised basement – as the best of contemporary taste required. Inside, continuing the mood, a sequence of vast pure spaces regulated by proportion and shallow ornament renders the very flow between rooms into the poetry of the architecture. 

Though it is a building of apparent simplicity, in fact Townley Hall is one of ingenious duplicity. Behind its tall cornice hides a pitched roof of sufficient scale to hold an attic lit by dormers, while below its earthen base lies another floor. This, and more, is revealed at the rear, where in addition to the actual four storey elevation is found the discreetly hidden kitchen wing and court. This last, an aspect of the modern convenience that always clouded the primitive aspirations of the most intense neoclassical patrons and architects, is the only part of the exterior to receive arches. 

Frances Johnston was a pupil of Thomas Cooley and, after the building of Townley Hall, he soon came to establish himself as Ireland’s finest native-born architect since Edward Lovett Pearce. Yet the commission for Blaney Townley -Balfour was not gained lightly. His patron looked for designs first, in 1792, from the noted Scottish neoclassicist James Playfair. Playfair records in his diaries the completion of his designs of July of that year, the work having been requested at a meeting in Rome the previous April. [p. 124] However, by 1794 Johnston had been decided upon as the new architect, and was soon able to supply a detailed estimate for the proposed house. The degree to which Johnston relied on the designs of the Scottish master is uncertain. What is clear is that a number of features explored by Playfair persist in Johnston’s work, from the use of seven-bay elevation to details in the kitchen court and even the door panelling – this last has a close parallel at Playfair’s own Cairness, Aberdeenshire. The cornices may be best compared to those of Johnston’s master Thomas Cooley at Caledon. Regardless of this, however, the character of the building has been made very much his own. 

Johnston’s estimate of £10,473, exclusive of decoration, was substantial, especially considering the lack of elaboration typical of this phase of neoclassicism. Much of the expense was due to a tireless sophistication of detail and the emphasis given to the provision of modern facilities. Townley, exceptional for its day, was equipped with running water, and the surviving drawings include a plan of these services. 

It is especially fortunate that a number of original documents and drawings survive, many now held in the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin. The mason is identified as John Glover of nearby Drogheda, but there is no record of the decorators who supplied the furnishings, and many of these may have been supplied through the architect. 

Followign the death of Mrs Townley-Balfour in 1954, widow of the grandson of Blaney Townley-Balfour and resident during the time of Hussey’s visit, it passed to David Crichton, from whom it was purchased by Trinity College Dublin in 1956, to serve as its first school of agriculture. It has more recently been in the possession of a private institution. Unfortunately, little of its original furniture survives and the kitchen wing, beautifully documented by Westley, has been gutted. 

[the attic dormitories are carefully detailed – note the curved fans to the corners over the window shutters – marking its original formal use as a barracks for the male visitors.] 

 
http://www.townleyhall.ie 

Townley Hall is a magnificent Georgian mansion built just over 200 years ago on a hilltop setting. Today it is surrounded by 60 acres of rolling parkland overlooking the Boyne Valley, very close to the site of the famous battle. The location is strikingly beautiful and peaceful. 

The House is an architectural jewel. It is renowned for its exquisite interior, wonderful proportions, the quality of the materials and craftsmanship used in its construction and, in particular, its magnificent staircase – of which Country Life magazine once said:  

Built in 1799, Townley Hall is regarded as a masterpiece in the classical style of Francis Johnston, the foremost Irish architect of his day. It sits in quiet seclusion of private grounds, approached by a long wooded avenue. Commissioned as a private home for the Townley Balfour family, it was designed to impress on the visitor not only the wealth and sophistication of a substantial landlord, but the craftsmanship available in the local area. Having undergone only minor alterations in over two centuries, this house is one of Ireland’s hidden architectural gems. 

Built in 1799, Townley Hall is regarded as a masterpiece in the classical style of Francis Johnston, the foremost Irish architect of his day. It sits in quiet seclusion of private grounds, approached by a long wooded avenue. Commissioned as a private home for the Townley Balfour family, it was designed to impress on the visitor not only the wealth and sophistication of a substantial landlord, but the craftsmanship available in the local area. Having undergone only minor alterations in over two centuries, this house is one of Ireland’s hidden architectural gems. The poet laureate Sir John Betjeman, in a survey of the work of Francis Johnson wrote:

  

	For information or bookings, contact the following:    Townley Hall (main house)   Slane Road  Drogheda  Co. Louth  Phone:  Fax:  Email: 041 983 8218  041 983 7142  info@townleyhall.ie

https://www.geni.com/projects/Historic-Buildings-of-County-Louth/29645

Townley Hall It was designed by Irish architect Francis Johnston for the Townley Balfour family and built between 1794 and 1798, regarded as a masterpiece in the classical style of Francis Johnston, the foremost Irish architect of his day. It sits in quiet seclusion of private grounds, approached by a long wooded avenue. Commissioned as a private home for the Townley Balfour family. 

○ WIKI Townley Hall 

Added notes from Irish Country Houses and Gardens, archives from Country Life, by Sean O’Reilly: Townley Hall, near the banks of River Boyne- a formal stone ‘box’, set off by rolling landscape and clumps of trees. It came to Blaney Townleu-Balfour on the death of his grandfather in 1780. It was described as “essential Irish Classicism”. There was an open rotunda staircase hall, inside, a sequence of vast, pure spaces- ingenious duplicity. Finally, in 1956, the House was purchased by Trinity College, Dublin, for the first School of Agriculture, but then went to a private institution. (It has attic dormitories). The kitchen was gutted. 

http://www.buildingsofireland.ie/PlacesToSee/Louth/  

Irish Castles and Historic Houses. ed. by Brendan O’Neill, intro. by James Stevens Curl. Caxton Editions, London. 2002 

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté*

Welcome to My World

Cupids play at the top of a blind niche in the rotunda of Townley Hall, County Louth, one of the loveliest houses in Ireland which has been discussed here on several occasions in the past (mostly notably Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté* on June 10th last year). Today marks the second anniversary of The Irish Aesthete, the first post being made on September 24th 2012. Two years later the site remains busy with at least three postings each week and, I am happy to report, an ever-increasing audience. In 2012 The Irish Aesthete received an average 23 views per day: the site now generates more than 610 views daily. Interest comes from across the world, the majority of visitors understandably resident in English-speaking countries but during the last quarter there have been substantial numbers from Brazil, the Russian Federation, Turkey and Vietnam, among many others. 
Whoever you are and wherever you live, thank you to all my readers for engaging with this site and for encouraging me to continue writing about Ireland’s architectural heritage, a subject dear to my heart and evidently to yours also. Your comments are always appreciated, although some of those written in more intemperate language may not be published (this site appreciates good manners). Please keep sending me your thoughts and responses, and in addition if you have suggestions for future subjects, I should be delighted to know of these: like all authors, I relish feedback. 
Thank you once again, and I look forward to retaining your interest over the next twelve months. 

Things Are Looking Up

Two of the ceilings in Townley Hall, County Louth, that of the drawing room (above) and the entrance hall (below). Dating from the late 1790s Townley has been discussed here before, not least its rotunda stairhall (see Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, June 10th) but amply repays further visits. The neo-classical masterpiece of Francis Johnston, the house owes as much to the couple responsible for its commissioning – Blayney Townley and Lady Florence Balfour – as to the architect. As these photographs show, the purity of decoration throughout is flawless. 

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté*

In 1788 nineteen-year old Blayney Townley Balfour inherited the estate of Townley, County Louth from his grandfather. Sensitive, intelligent and affluent, around the time he came of age Balfour consulted with architect Francis Johnston about building a new house at Townley to replace the existing structure: Johnston had not long before completed work for Archbishop Richard Robinson at nearby Rokeby Hall (see Building on a Prelate’s Ambition, February 4th). At that stage the proposed design was not dissimilar from that seen at Rokeby, the idea being to construct a tall pedimented block. 
The project proceeded no further before 1791 when Balfour departed for France with his mother and sisters. Leaving them behind in Nice, he went on to Italy and spent time exploring the heritage of Florence and Rome, in the latter city meeting the Scottish neo-classical architect James Playfair. Following Balfour’s return to Ireland in early 1793 he received three designs for a new house from Playfair and while some of the ideas these contained (specifically the notion of a sunken courtyard at the rear of the building to accommodate kitchen and other services) were eventually incorporated, none of them was used by Townley Hall’s owner. 

Informed by all he had seen on mainland Europe, once back in Ireland Balfour reverted to Francis Johnston. Yet the outcome of this commission seems to owe as much to client as architect. Indeed Balfour and one of his sisters Anne produced their own drawings for the proposed house and came up with its most distinctive feature: the circular central stair hall. Nevertheless the specifics of Townley Hall were designed by Johnston and it is justifiably considered to be his masterpiece. 
From the exterior, the building could not be more simple and unadorned: an apparently two-storey block (there is also a basement, and an attic level concealed behind the roof parapet) faced in limestone with each side of seven bays (except for the rear) and measuring ninety feet. The entrance is distinguished only by a plain porch with paired and fluted Doric columns and the windows are no more than openings in their respective walls. 

The interior of Townley Hall is equally spare, but the occasional decorative flourish is so well applied and the quality of workmanship so flawless that the result is a building of rare refinement. Even so, nothing prepares a first-time visitor for the coup de foudre which lies at the heart of the house: its stair hall. This space owes an obvious debt to Palladio’s Villa Rotonda and to the Pantheon, both that in Rome and that designed in London by James Wyatt in 1772. Indeed Wyatt’s influence on Johnston’s work at Townley Hall is generally accepted, not least because in 1796 Blayney Townley Balfour married Lady Florence Cole whose family lived at Florence Court, County Fermanagh which is not far from Wyatt’s own neo-classical masterpiece Castle Coole. 

Four mahogany doors set on the cardinal points and within relieving arches open into the stair hall. The cantilevered Portland stone stairs (with slender brass balusters finishing in a mahogany handrail) rise with gentle sinuosity around the wall perimeter, breaking once to form a landing directly above the door facing that from the entrance hall. At this level the doors are surrounded by arched frames which are also repeated around the curved walls, even when the stairs intervene. In order to minimise the divide between ground and first floor Johnston devised a shallow stepped Greek key border interwoven with a vine tendril, lines of acorns hanging from the lower section. 
Once on the landing, greater degrees of decoration are permitted, not least in the treatment of a further series of arches alternately left clear and filled with stuccowork of frolicking putti (and in three places they open into shallow lobbies providing access to bedrooms). At their topmost point these arches are tied by keystones to a frieze beneath the dome of ox skulls between swathes of drapery. Above it all rises the lightly coffered dome of thirty feet diameter, the central portion being glazed. 
There are times when language cannot do justice to a work of art, and Townley’s stair hall is one of them: the pictures shown here are infinitely more eloquent. The elegance of proportions, the perfection of form, the play of light on surface all combine to make this without question one of the loveliest rooms in the country, a flawless piece of design, the culmination of 18th century Irish architecture and a tribute to those responsible for its creation. No longer a private house, the building is now under the care of the School of Philosophy and Economic Science which is currently undertaking a programme of repair. 

*From Charles Baudelaire’s L’invitation au voyage.  

With thanks to Michael Kavanagh of MVK Architects.  

A Hundred Little Pieces

Radiating Portland stone lozenges cover the floor of the staircase hall at Townley Hall, County Louth. Dating from the late 1790s, the house is architect Francis Johnston’s masterpiece, one of the purest examples of neo-classicism in Ireland. 
This also marks the hundredth piece from the Irish Aesthete since the site made its debut last September. And so readers, you are cordially invited to offer feedback: what subjects most interest you; about what would you like to read more; are there buildings or subjects you wish to see featured? As ever, comments of the literate and temperate variety are welcomed. 

Maximum Impact, Minimal Means

The limestone gate lodge of Townley Hall, County Louth, believed to have been designed around 1819 by the main house’s architecturally informed owner Blayney Townley Balfour and his wife Lady Florence Cole. Taking the form of a dimunitive Greek temple, it makes a striking impression not least thanks to the pedimented and Doric columned portico. Although now empty, it continues to be well preserved and to demonstrate the possibility of achieving a lot with a little. 

Suffering Neglect

As has been discussed here before, Townley Hall, County Louth is one of Ireland’s most perfect neo-classical buildings (see: https://theirishaesthete.com/2013/06/10/la-tout-nest-quordre-et-beaute). The house was designed in the mid-1790s by Francis Johnston, who until then had been employed primarily by Richard Robinson, Archbishop of Armagh, often to complete commissions left unfinished following the early death of Thomas Cooley in 1784. Townley Hall is his first independent piece of work although here again the client’s involvement was critical since it is known that Blayney Townley Balfour, who owned the property, and his sister Anna Maria were intimately involved in every stage of the design. 

Johnston was invited to design not just Townley Hall itself but also a number of ancillary buildings, including a new stableyard. His plans for this survive and are dated between 1799 (work being initiated on the site in May of that year) and 1804. The intention was to build around a rectangular courtyard with coach house and grainstore topped by a cupola on the north side, and stables coming forward to its immediate east and west. The south side was to be taken up by screen wall with arched entrance. Sadly this scheme was never realized, possibly for financial reasons (like many other house builders before and since, Blayney Townley Balfour discovered the initial budget was insufficient). Instead, while the northern range was constructed, it lacked the proposed cupola, and only the western range of stables were finished; a terrace of single-storey cottages runs along the eastern side of the site. Likewise the south wall with entrance arch was left unbuilt, and even a modified plan for railings with piers went unrealized. A drawing of the plan survives a penciled note reading ‘not built yet – 1837 FTB’, those initials standing for Lady Florence Townley Balfour (daughter of the first Earl of Enniskillen) who had married Blayney Townley Balfour in 1797. 

As is well known, Townley Hall was sold by the heirs of the Townley Balfour family in the 1950s and, having been owned for a short period of time by Trinity College Dublin, was sold again with the Land Commission taking the greater part of the surrounding estate. Many of the ancillary buildings are no longer part of Townley Hall, including the former stableyard. Almost every other part of the former estate has been restored and brought into use, but sadly this element, which is, it seems, independently owned, has languished in neglect for a number of years, and is now in poor repair. Even if not as originally intended by Johnston, the yard remains associated with what is widely judged to be his masterpiece, and accordingly deserves a better fate. 

https://landedfamilies.blogspot.com/search/label/Ireland?updated-max=2018-11-22T17:49:00Z&max-results=20&start=10&by-date=false

Balfour (later Townley Balfour) of Castle Balfour and Townley Hall 

In 1611, Sir Michael Balfour (d. 1619), 1st Lord Balfour of Burleigh, was appointed as one of the undertakers of the plantation of Ulster, and given a grant of 3,000 acres in County Fermanagh. Being preoccupied with affairs in England and Scotland, he seems to have made over some 2,000 acres of this grant to his younger brother, Sir James Balfour (d. 1634) (ennobled in 1619 as 1st Baron Balfour of Glenawley in the Irish peerage), and to have sold the remainder to Sir Stephen Butler. In about 1618 Sir James built Balfour Castle at Lisnaskea (Co. Fermanagh) in fulfilment of the requirement on the plantation undertakers to establish defensible homes on their estates, and in 1626 he had a further grant of lands in Fermanagh. At some point before 1634, however, he sold the Pitcullo estate in Fife and his property in northern Ireland to Sir William Balfour (c.1575-1660), a soldier who was in the service of the States of Holland until 1627 and thereafter in that of King Charles I. Sir William is sometimes described as Lord Balfour of Glenawley’s cousin, but although the two men were evidently kin, any connection between them lay in the 15th century or earlier and is too distant to be traced. Sir William, who was Constable of the Tower of London 1630-41, can have had little time for his Irish property, but when it was threatened by the Irish rebellion of 1641, he dispatched his eldest son to Ireland as part of the Scots army sent to put down the rebellion, and he later obtained a commission to take a regiment to Ireland himself, although the start of the English civil war the following year prevented his going. Sir William’s staunch Presbyterian and anti-Catholic views (it is said that in 1638 he beat up a priest who attempted to convert his wife to Catholicism) led to increasingly uncertainty about his loyalty to Charles I, and at the end of 1641 he seems to have been forced to resign the constableship of the Tower. When the English Civil War began the following summer he joined the Parliamentarian side, and he was active in the field in many of the major engagements until 1645, when his health seems to have broken down, and he gave up his commands. Parliament ordered the payment of all his arrears of pay (some £7,000), but shortly afterwards doubts arose about his loyalty which were made a convenient excuse to defer payment, and much of the amount was still outstanding in 1655. In his declining years, Sir William made his home in Westminster, where he died in 1660, having lived just long enough to see the restoration of the monarchy. His widow, Isabella, continued to live there until her death in 1678. 

Sir William Balfour (d. 1660) married twice. By his first wife, he had two sons, Alexander and William, who were both soldiers like their father. The intention seems to have been for Alexander to inherit the Irish estates and for William to inherit Pitcullo, but in fact both men were killed during the Civil War, so that Sir William’s property devolved on his only son by his second wife, Charles Balfour (c.1631-1713). It may be that Pitcullo formed part of the dowry of one of Sir William’s three daughters, or it may have been sold, but at all events it seems to have left the family at this time, and Charles and his descendants only had significant property in Ireland. Balfour Castle seems to have survived the Civil Wars of the mid 17th century and to have been reinforced in 1652 by Edmund Ludlow as a Protestant stronghold. It was less fortunate in 1689, when it is said to have been ‘dismantled’, presumably by the army of King James II, in a conflict in which Charles’s son, William Balfour (d. 1739) was active in the Williamite cause. Although the house was evidently repaired and continued in use down to 1803, it was probably no longer fit for gentry occupation, and the house belonging to William at Lisnaskea in 1730 (which was then said to be in poor condition and occupied as an alehouse) was probably a house in the town rather than the castle. William, who was the first of his family known to have served as an MP, probably lived mainly in Dublin. The estate was gradually fragmented by land sales in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and it was a greatly diminished property which passed at William’s death in 1739 to his nephew, Henry (or Harry) Townley, who took the additional surname Balfour as a condition of his inheritance. 

Henry Townley (1693-1741) was the son of Blayney Townley (1665-1722) of Piedmont Hall, Louth and his wife Lucy, the sister of William Balfour. Blayney Townley had been born at Athclare Castle near Dunleer (Co. Louth), but apparently went to live at Piedmont Hall on his marriage in 1692. It seems likely that this property had belonged to his family for some time, but the house there may have been built for him. It was already shown as ruined on the 1st edition Ordnance Survey of Ireland 6″ map in the mid-19th century, but an account of 1924, when about half of the original house was still standing, described it as ‘a long, two-storied slated house’, very tall and narrow from front to back, with three high pitched gables facing the rear. Only a gable-end seems to survive today, and no illustration of the house has been found. At Piedmont House, Blayney and Lucy Townley raised a family of three sons and four daughters, and also Lucy’s daughter by her first husband. Henry Townley (later Townley Balfour) was their eldest son, and inherited Piedmont Hall on his father’s death as well as the Balfour Castle estate. He and his wife had only one son and one daughter, and the son, William Charles Townley Balfour (c.1730-59) died without issue, with the result that the estates passed to Henry’s surviving younger brother, Blayney Townley Townley (1705-88) of Townley Hall (Co. Louth), which he had acquired through his marriage to his cousin Mary, daughter of Hamilton Townley of Townley Hall. Blayney Townley took the additional name Balfour on coming into his inheritance, and ever afterwards the heir in each generation had the names Blayney Townley Balfour.  
 
In 1788, on the death of Blayney Townley Balfour (d. 1788), the Townley Hall, Piedmont Hall and Balfour Castle estates all descended to his grandson of the same name (1769-1856), who was travelling in Germany and Switzerland at the time. A cultured young man, he took a particular interest in architecture, and before leaving for further continental travels in 1791-92, he commissioned designs for a new house at Townley Hall from the young Irish architect, Francis Johnston (1760-1829). Johnston’s design, for a tall pedimented block very much like his recently completed house at Rokeby Hall (Co. Louth) survives, but evidently did not satisfy his client. While in Rome, Townley Balfour commissioned alternative designs from the Scottish architect James Playfair which were delivered in 1793, after his return to Ireland. All Playfair’s schemes proposed a neo-classical house with a sunk basement and detached kitchen wing, and these ideas provided the starting point for Balfour and his sister Anne, an accomplished amateur of architecture, to develop their own design. It was they who came up with the idea of planning the house around a circular staircase hall 30ft in diameter set in the centre of a house 90ft square. Having done so, they went back to Johnston, who developed the detailed proposals that allowed the house to actually be built and prepared an estimate for its construction in January 1794. In 1797, Balfour married Lady Florence Cole, a daughter of the Earl of Erne from Florence Court (Co. Fermanagh), who came to share the interest of her husband and sister-in-law in architecture. She perhaps introduced her husband to the sophisticated elegance of James Wyatt’s work at Castle Coole, near her parents’ home, echoes of which can be found in the detailing and interior decoration of Townley Hall.  
 
In 1821, B.T. Balfour sold what was left of the Balfour Castle estate to his father-in-law (then approaching the venerable age of ninety) and thereafter the interests of the family were concentrated in County Louth. The one exception to that seems to have been a property at Rostrevor (Co. Down), which seems to have become, in effect, the family’s dower house. Balfour’s sister Anne (d. 1820), who married the Rev. Thomas Vesey Dawson, rector of Loughgilly (Armagh), lived in her short widowhood at Rostrevor and the family may have owned a property there from that time onwards.  

At all events, when Balfour died in 1856 and his son, Blayney Townley Balfour (1799-1882) moved into Townley Hall, his widow and her unmarried daughters moved to Rostrevor, where they acquired an irregular picturesque villa with deep eaves, bay windows, bargeboards, and Tudor hoodmoulds over some of the windows. This house, known as Fairy Hill, stood close to the centre of the village, and seems to have been built in the 1830s or 1840s, perhaps for the previous owner, Pierse Marcus Barron, who was resident in 1851. The family seem to have sold it after the last of the Balfour sisters died in 1892. 
 
Blayney Townley Balfour (1799-1882) seems to have spend a good deal of his time in England, where he lived in both London and Bristol at different times. He was a friend of Lord Goderich, who was briefly Prime Minister in the 1820s, and who seems to have secured his appointment as Lieutenant Governor of the Bahamas, 1833-35, an isolated public appointment in the career of an otherwise rather private man of antiquarian interests. He was succeeded by his elder son, Blayney Reynell Townley Balfour (1845-1928), a cultured man, also with antiquarian interests, who married late and had no children. In 1908 he became one of the first landowners in County Louth to take advantage of the Wyndham Act and sell his estate to his tenants. He retained only the demesne (still some 850 acres), and when he died, this and the house passed to his widow, Madeline Balfour (d. 1955). She bequeathed the estate to her cousin, David Crichton, who sold it two years later to Trinity College, Dublin. The house was restored and occupied by the college’s School of Agriculture for some years, but in 1967 the University decided to sell the estate to the Land Commission and the Forestry Dept. Professor Frank Mitchell, one of the fellows of TCD, who was concerned about the fate of other houses which had passed into the hands of the agencies of the Irish state, stepped in to buy the house and immediate grounds to ensure their preservation. He and his wife turned the house into a study centre, and when they decided to retire, they found a charitable organisation, the School of Philosophy and Economic Science, who have on the whole been sympathetic owners and have carried out a fine restoration of the house. 

Townley Hall, Co. Louth 

 
One of the greatest neo-classical houses of Ireland, built in 1794-98 for Blayney Townley Balfour (1769-1856) and his wife Lady Florence Cole from Florence Court (Co. Fermanagh) to designs by Francis Johnston, but evidently with considerable input from Balfour himself and his sister Anne, who emerges as an accomplished amateur architect.  
 

Townley Hall: entrance front.

 
The square house of grey limestone sits on the crown of a shallow hill and has three seven-bay fronts ’of singular and impressive austerity’ of two storeys above a sunk basement; the kitchen offices (which became derelict and roofless in the 20th century but have been recently returned to use for new purposes) are below ground level and open onto a broad yard at the back of the house which is almost entirely concealed from view.  

Townley Hall: the Greek Doric portico on the entrance front.  Image: Nick Kingsley. Some rights reserved.

The main facades are identical except for the single-storey Greek Doric portico on the entrance front, and devoid of all ornament except for a stringcourse and a bold cornice supporting a parapet that conceals the low-pitched roof. The facades derive their beauty from perfect proportions and the precision and accomplishment of the detail. 
 
Inside, the entrance hall has a Portland stone floor, coffered ceiling, arched recesses on the walls and a pair of finely carved Doric chimneypieces. It leads through to a central top-lit circular rotunda with a glazed dome, which houses the wonderfully graceful staircase curving gently around the wall of the room. The floor has a complex radiating pattern of angular lozenges. On the first floor the wall is articulated as a succession of eight shallow arches, tied by enlarged keystones to a frieze of ox skulls set between swathes of fringed drapery. The soffit of the dome is panelled in light diagonal coffers in a pattern based on the popular model of the apses of the Temple of Venus in Rome, but subtly adapted by Johnston to be lighter and more elegant. In designing the room, Johnston has also avoided a heavy division between the ground and first floors, or between the first floor and the dome, so that the whole cylindical space of the rotunda flows upwards in an unbroken movement. 
 

Townley Hall: staircase hall in 1996. Image: Nick Kingsley. Some rights reserved.

Townley Hall: dome above the staircase hall.  Image: Elena Tatiana Chis. Some rights reserved.

Townley Hall: the remarkably intricate pattern of the stone floor of the central rotunda. Image: © Conor Kenny

 
The rest of the interior consists of a series of generously large, airy rooms with simple decoration of refreshing clarity, arranged around the staircase hall and given sophistication by the quality of their joinery and plasterwork, which is evidently influenced (in both details such as the central circular panels of the drawing room doors and the drawing room ceiling) by a knowledge of what was being done at Castlecoole (Co. Fermanagh) under the direction of James Wyatt. The drawing room and dining room in particular are beautifully proportioned rooms, 18 ft high, 24 ft wide and 36 ft long. The rightness of these ratios is felt within each room and is enhanced by the clean lines of the cornices and the shallow mouldings on ceilings, doors, architraves and shutters. 

Townley Hall: drawing room ceiling. Image: © The Irish Aesthete

Townley Hall: the support pillar for the floor of the rotunda in the basement. Image: © Conor Kenny

In the basement below the staircase hall, the great weight of the Portland stone pavement above required support. The first idea was to build a circular load-bearing wall in the centre of the room, but in the end this was replaced by a more elegant quatrefoil Gothick shaft, which is plumbed to carry water to four stone basins at the base of the shaft. It is the one departure from the classical in the house, and seems to be inspired by a famous local antiquity, the lavabo at Mellifont Abbey, some three miles away. The execution of the Gothic mouldings, carved by a mason called Glover, is as precise as the classical detail elsewhere. 
 
After their marriage in 1796, Lady Florence Balfour came to share the architectural interests of her husband and sister-in-law, and it was certainly she and her husband who designed the main entrance gates, erected in 1810, and probably the gate lodge, built in 1819 as a primitive temple, perhaps to prepare the visitor for the radical austerity of the house. Built in an unorthodox Tuscan order, its portico has baseless columns with smooth shafts, primitive blockish capitals, and a deeply overhanging eaves cornice supported on elongated mutules – a miniature and neo-classical reworking of Inigo Jones’ design for St. Paul, Covent Garden. 
 

Townley Hall: the gate lodge designed in 1819 by Blayney and Lady Florence Balfour. Image: Patrick Comerford

 
Since 2012 the house has been undergoing a programme of gentle repair and refreshment under the experienced guidance of MVK Architects. A major element of the scheme has been the return of the former kitchen wing to habitable use as bedroom and bathroom accommodation for the residential study centre which now occupies the house, and this is very welcome in principle. Unfortunately, to provide the accommodation required a second floor and lift tower has been added to the kitchen wing, and the decision has been made to execute this in a minimalist modern style in the apparent belief that this will somehow echo the austerity of Johnston’s original design. This is misguided on at least two levels. In the first place, there is a world of difference between the precise and refined restraint of the original design, which is practised within the fundamental constraints imposed by the classical language,  and the interstellar-void-bleakness of modernist austerity. Secondly, the elevation of the wing to the sunk rear courtyard was the one part of the original design that broke with the severity of the main block, having an elegant arcade of three tall arched windows (lighting the kitchen) set between a pair of unusual features in which a low segmental arch is cut by a beam, at the level of the impost of the kitchen arcade, and supported by a pair of baseless, unfluted columns.  The alien new extension squats on top of this highly modelled facade with all the charm and responsiveness of a shoe box. Moreover, whereas the original design carefully sunk the kitchen wing into the ground, so that from three sides the house appeared unencumbered by any service additions, the addition of a second floor means it is now visible in all views of the house from the north, south and west. One hopes that this uncharacteristic lapse of judgement will soon be corrected, and the addition either removed or remodelled in a more acceptable form. 
 
Descent: Hamilton Townley (b. 1673); to daughter Mary, wife of Blayney Townley Balfour (1705-88); to grandson, Blayney Townley Balfour (1769-1856); to son, Blayney Townley Balfour (1799-1882); to son, Blayney Reynell Townley Balfour (1845-1928); to widow, Madeline Elizabeth Balfour (d. 1955); to cousin, David Crichton; sold 1956 to Trinity College, Dublin for use by its School of Agriculture; sold 1967 to Professor Frank Mitchell; sold to School of Philosophy and Economic Science, a charity, for use as a residential study centre. 

Balfour family of Castle Balfour and Townley Hall 

Balfour, Lt-Gen. Sir William (c.1575-1660). Elder son of Col. Henry Balfour (d. 1580), a mercenary in the service of William of Orange, and his wife Christian, sister of Capt. David Cant, perhaps born c.1575. Educated by Duncan Balfour of St. Andrews, who was appointed his tutor after his father’s death. He served at intervals as an officer in the Scottish brigade in the Low Countries (Lt. by 1594; Sergeant-Major, 1610; Capt., 1615-24), but was also a member of the household of King James VI and I. In 1627 King Charles I secured his release from Dutch service and he became an officer in the Earl of Morton’s regiment (Lt-Col.), and then in 1630 Governor of the Tower of London. He was knighted by King James I in about 1605 and made a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber in the late 1620s. He was employed on a variety of difficult and confidential missions by King Charles, and rewarded with a lucrative patent to mint gold and silver money at the Tower in 1633. He was appointed to the King’s Council of War in June 1638 and continued in favour until 1641, but his strong Presbyterianism and strong anti-Catholicism seem gradually to have weakened his loyalty, and in December 1641 he either resigned or more probably was forced to resign, his Constableship of the Tower. In the spring of 1642 he was appointed to the command of a cavalry regiment destined for service in Ulster (where he no doubt hoped to protect his own property from the Catholic rebels), but before he could set off the English civil war had broken out and in August 1642 he joined the Parliamentarian side, being appointed a Lt-General of horse under the Earl of Bedford. He was active in the field until 1645 when he became too ill to continue fighting. As a Scot he was perhaps never wholly trusted by the English parliamentarians, and in 1650 when Cromwell proposed to invade Scotland he accepted a commission from the Scots parliament to command ‘strangers and native volunteers’, although he never seems to have taken up the command. In 1651 his wife was given four weeks to leave England, but later in the 1650s they lived quietly in Westminster. He married 1st, Helen (d. 1629), daughter of Sir Archibald Napier of Merchiston, and 2nd, Isabella (d. 1678), daughter of Evert Bosch van Weede and widow of Henry More, son of Sir Edward More, and had issue:  
(1.1) Lt-Col. Alexander Balfour (fl. 1619-45); an officer in the service of the Dutch; married Elizabeth Anne Brunch or Bueuch, but perhaps had no issue; killed in the Civil War in Ireland; 
(1.2) Col. William Balfour (fl. 1619-44); had a grant of Pitcullo from his father, 24 August 1619; an officer in the Dutch army (Col.) and later in the service of Parliament as a cavalry commander during the Civil War, when he was active in Cornwall and Devon; married Christian Melville, but had no issue; killed in the Civil War in Somerset; 
(2.1) Charles Balfour (c.1631-1713) (q.v.); 
(2.2) Susanna Balfour (d. 1687); married 1st, c.1659, as his third wife, Hugh Hamilton (d. 1678), 1st Baron Hamilton of Glenawley, son of Malcolm Hamilton, Archbishop of Cashel, and had issue two sons and two daughters; married 2nd, Henry Mervyn MP (c.1628-1701) of Trillick (Tyrone); died in Dublin, 11 December, and was buried there 14 December 1687; 
(2.3) Emilia Balfour (d. 1683); married, before 1657, Alexander Stewart (1634-1701), 5th Earl of Moray and had issue four sons and one daughter; died 16 January 1683; 
(2.4) Isabella Balfour (fl. 1674); married, 1649, John Balfour (c.1620-97), 3rd Lord Balfour of Burleigh, and had issue three sons and six daughters. 
He purchased the lands and castle of Pitcullo and Castle Balfour at Lisnaskea (Co. Fermanagh) from Sir James Balfour (d. 1634), 1st Baron Balfour of Glenawley between 1626 and 1629. 
He was buried at Westminster (Middx), 28 July 1660. His first wife died in December 1629. His widow was buried at Westminster, 28 March 1674; her will was proved in the PCC, 1 April 1674. 
 
Balfour, Charles (c.1631-1713). Only son of Sir William Balfour (d. 1660) and his second wife Isabella, daughter of Evert Bosch van Weede and widow of Henry Moore, born about 1631. He married, 1665, Cicely (c.1644-88), daughter and heir of Sir Robert Byron of Colwick (Notts) and had issue: 
(1) William Balfour (d. 1739) (q.v.); 
(2) Lucy Balfour (d. 1713) (q.v.); 
(3) A daughter. 
He inherited Castle Balfour from his father in 1660. 
He died in May 1713. His wife died in about 1688. 
 
Balfour, William (d. 1739). Only son of Charles Balfour (d. 1713) and his wife Cicely, daughter and heir of Sir Robert Byron of Colwick (Notts). He was an officer in the army of the Prince of Orange in Ireland (Capt., 1688; retired on half-pay by 1713) and was attainted by King James II and the Irish Parliament in 1689. Despite this, he was initially a Tory in politics, but by 1713 had joined the Whigs; he was MP for Carlingford, 1705-13, and for Augher, 1713-14, 1715-39. He was awarded an honorary degree by Trinity College, Dublin, 1718 (LLD). High Sheriff of Co. Fermanagh, 1734. He was unmarried and without issue. 
He inherited Castle Balfour from his father in 1713, but by 1730 his house at Lisnaskea was being used as an alehouse and was in poor repair. At his death the estate passed to his nephew, Henry Townley (later Balfour) (1693-1741). He probably lived mainly in Dublin. 
He died 19 April 1739; his will was proved in Dublin the same year. 
 
Balfour, Lucy (d. 1713). Elder daughter of Charles Balfour (d. 1713) and his wife Cicely, daughter and heir of Sir Robert Byron of Colwick (Notts). She married 1st, 1684, Hugh McGill (d. 1690) of Kirkestown (Co. Down) and 2nd, 14 November 1692, Blayney Townley (1665-1722) of Piedmont (Co. Louth) and Athclare Castle (Co. Louth), MP in Irish Parliament for Dunleer, 1692-93, 1695-99, 1703-14 and for Carlingford 1715-22, son of Henry Blayney (d. 1691) of Aclare (Louth), and had issue: 
(1.1) Jane McGill (c.1690-c.1776); married Samuel Molyneux Madden (1686-1765), and had issue one son and one daughter; 
(2.1) Henry Townley (later Balfour) (1693-1741) (q.v.); 
(2.2) Elizabeth Townley (c.1694-1750); married, 1 October 1709, Rev. Hans Montgomerie (1668-1726), rector of Killinshee, vicar of Ballywalter and curate of Grey Abbey, and had issue four daughters; died 3 January 1750; 
(2.3) Charles Townley; 
(2.4) Mary Townley; 
(2.5) Lucy Townley; married [forename unknown] Berry; 
(2.6) Vincentia Townley (c.1704-63); married, 18 April 1730, Wallop Brabazon (1698-1767) of Rath (Louth), and had issue three sons and one daughter; died 1763. 
(2.7) Blayney Townley (later Balfour) (1705-88) (q.v.). 
She and her second husband settled at Piedmont (Co. Louth). 
She died 14 June 1713 and was buried at Dunleer. Her first husband died between 1684 and 1692. Her second husband died at Piedmont, 22 August 1722, and was buried at Dunleer; his will was proved in Dublin, 1723. 
 
Townley (later Balfour), Henry (1693-1741). Elder son of Blayney Townley (1665-1722) and his wife Lucy, elder daughter of Charles Balfour of Castle Balfour (Co. Fermanagh) and widow of Hugh McGill of Kirkestown (Co. Down), born 19 December 1693. Sovereign (i.e. Mayor) of Carlingford, 1720, 1728; High Sheriff of Co. Louth, 1726. MP in the Irish Parliament for Carlingford, 1727-41. He took the additional surname Balfour in 1739 after inheriting the estates of his uncle, William Balfour, and was described by his obituarist as “a Gentleman of sweet Temper, great Honour and Hospitality, and every Virtue that could render a Man agreeable”. He married, 1724, Anne (d. 1741), daughter of Col. Henry Percy of Seskin (Co. Wicklow), and had issue: 
(1) William Charles Townley Balfour (c.1730-59) (q.v.); 
(2) Emilia Balfour. 
He inherited the Piedmont (Co. Louth) estate from his father in 1722 and Castle Balfour (Co. Fermanagh) from his maternal uncle in 1739. 
He died in Dublin, 20 July 1741. His wife’s will was proved in 1741. 
 
Balfour, William Charles Townley (c.1730-59). Only son of Henry Townley (later Balfour) (1693-1741) and his wife Anne, daughter of Col. Henry Percy of Seskin (Co. Wexford), born about 1730. A member of the Royal Dublin Society, 1756-59. High Sheriff of Co. Fermanagh, 1757. MP in the Irish Parliament for Carlingford, 1757-59. He married, 1754, Mary (c.1733-89), daughter of Maj. Thomas Aston of Drogheda (Co. Louth), but had no issue. 
He inherited the Castle Balfour and Piedmont estates from his father in 1741 and lived at Beamore (Co. Meath). On his death his estates passed to his uncle, Blayney Townley (later Balfour) (1705-88). His widow lived for some years at Chequers (Bucks). 
He died 21 November 1759. His widow died in 1789. 
 
Townley (later Balfour), Blayney Townley (1705-88). Youngest son of Blayney Townley (1666-1722) and his wife Lucy, elder daughter of Charles Balfour of Castle Balfour (Co. Fermanagh) and widow of Hugh McGill of Kirkestown (Co. Down), born 26 July 1705 and baptised, probably at Ballymascanlan. Educated at Carrickmacross Grammar School, Trinity College, Dublin (admitted 1723) and Middle Temple (admitted 1727; called to Irish bar. 1731). A Governor of the Dublin Workhouse, 1755-68 and of the Foundling Hospital and Workhouse, 1769-88; a member of the Royal Dublin Society, 1768-88. He took the additional surname Balfour on inheriting the estates of his nephew in 1759. MP in Irish Parliament for Carlingford, Jan-Oct 1760, 1761-76. He married, 30 November 1734, his first cousin Mary, daughter and heiress of Hamilton Townley of Townley Hall and widow of William Tenison of Thomastown (Co. Louth), and had issue: 
(1) Hamilton Townley Balfour (1742-46), born 1742; died young, 1746; 
(2) Blayney Townley Balfour (1744-71) (q.v.). 
On his marriage, he settled at Townley Hall which his wife had inherited from her father. He inherited the Castle Balfour and Piedmont estates from his nephew in 1759.  
He died in 1788. His wife’s date of death is unknown. 
 
Townley Balfour, Blayney (1744-71). Only surviving son of Blayney Townley (later Balfour) (1705-88) and his wife Mary, daughter and heiress of Hamilton Townley of Townley Hall (Co. Louth) and widow of William Tenison of Thomastown (Co. Louth), born 1744. Educated at Brasenose College, Oxford (matriculated 1763). High Sheriff of Co. Louth, 1771. He married, 20 February 1768, Letitia (1746-1838), daughter of Francis Leigh, MP for Drogheda, and had issue: 
(1) Blayney Townley Balfour (1769-1856) (q.v.); 
(2) Anna Maria Townley Balfour (1770-1820); shared her brother’s interest in architecture and was involved in the design of Townley Hall; married, 6 November 1793, Very Rev. Thomas Vesey Dawson (1768-1811), Dean of Clonmacnoise and rector of Loughgilly (Armagh), 1806-11, third son of Richard Dawson of Ardee, but had no issue; died at Rostrevor (Down), 19 May and was buried at Townley Hall, 23 May 1820; 
(3) Mary Frances Townley Balfour (1772-1820), born 1772; died unmarried on the day of her sister’s burial, 23 May 1820. 
He died in the lifetime of his father, 8 December 1771. His widow died in Dublin aged 91, 10 April 1838, and her will was proved the same year. 
 
Townley Balfour, Blayney (1769-1856). Only son of Blayney Townley Balfour (1744-71) and his wife Letitia, daughter of Francis Leigh, MP for Drogheda, born 28 May 1769. Educated at Trinity College, Oxford (matriculated 1786), travelled in Switzerland and Germany, 1788, made a visit to Nice (France), 1791, with his mother and sisters, and then went on alone to Italy (visiting Genoa, Turin, Parma, Modena, Bologna, Florence and Rome, and returning by Venice) in 1791-92. During his travels, he became interested in architecture, and while in Rome he commissioned designs for a new house at Townley Hall from James Playfair, which were eventually superseded. He and his sister Anne seem both to have been competent amateur architects, and his wife came to share their interest. He had important input into the eventual design of the new house at Townley Hall, and he and his wife evidently designed the lodge and gatepiers. JP and DL for Co. Louth; High Sheriff of Louth, 1792. In politics he was strongly opposed to the Union with Great Britain, and secured a seat in the Irish Parliament as MP for Belturbet, Jan-August 1800 in order to vote against it. He married, 17 October 1797, Lady Florence (c.1779-1862), daughter of William Willoughby Cole, 1st Earl of Enniskillen, and had issue: 
(1) Blayney Townley Balfour (1799-1882) (q.v.); 
(2) Anne Maria Townley Balfour (1800-92), born 5 July 1800; lived at The Fairy Hill, Rostrevor (Co. Down); died unmarried aged 92, on 29 August 1892; will proved in Dublin, 14 February 1893 (effects £5,616); 
(3) Rev. Willoughby William Townley Balfour (1801-88), born 10 October 1801; educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Dublin (matriculated 1819; BA 1823); ordained deacon, 1829 and priest, 1832; vicar of Askeaton (Co. Limerick), 1833-37; rector of Aston Flamville with Burbage (Leics), 1837-78; died unmarried at The Fairy Hill, Rostrevor, 29 June 1888; will proved 29 November 1888 (effects £3,276); 
(4) Letitia Frances Townley Balfour (1803-85), born 7 November 1803; lived at The Fairy Hill, Rostrevor; died unmarried, 30 January 1885; will proved 24 March 1885 (effects £5,144); 
(5) Francis Leigh Townley Balfour (1805-33), born 22 February and baptised at Clifton (Glos), 27 February 1805; died unmarried of “the Country Fever”, 28 October 1833 and was buried in St John’s Cathedral, Belize City, where he is commemorated by a mural tablet designed by Joseph Theakston and executed in 1844; 
(6) Florence Henrietta Townley Balfour (1808-81), born 28 July 1808; died unmarried at The Fairy Hill, Rostrevor, 23 July 1881; will proved 25 November 1881 (effects £3,894); 
(7) Maj. Arthur Lowry (Townley) Balfour (1809-50), born 3 December 1809; an officer in the army (Lt., 1833; Capt., 1839; Maj., 1849); ADC to Sir Charles Metcalfe as Governor General of Canada, 1843; died of smallpox at Govindhur (India), 13 July 1850; administration of his goods was granted to one of his creditors, 5 August 1858 (effects under £450); 
(8) Elizabeth Sarah Townley Balfour (1813-38), born 21 August and baptised at Kingston (Surrey), 12 September 1813; died unmarried, ‘after a few hours’ illness’ at Ryde (IoW), 19 November 1838; 
(9) Lowry Vesey Townley Balfour (1819-78), born 30 March 1819; Secretary of the Order of St. Patrick and Gentleman-at-Large to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; died unmarried in Dublin, 12 February 1878; will proved in Dublin, 6 June 1878 (estate in Ireland under £7,000 and in England under £1,500). 
He inherited Townley Hall from his grandfather in 1788, and built a new house there in 1794-98 to the designs of Francis Johnston. He sold the remaining part of the Castle Balfour estate in 1821 to John Creighton (1731-1828), 1st Earl of Erne. 
He died 22 December 1856. His widow died at Rostrevor (Co. Down), 1 March 1862; her will was proved 10 April 1862 (effects under £8,000). 
 
Townley Balfour, Blayney (1799-1882). Eldest son of Blayney Townley Balfour (1769-1856) and his wife Lady Florence, daughter of William Willoughby Cole, 1st Earl of Enniskillen, born 2 July 1799. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford (matriculated 1818; BA 1822). Lieutenant-Governor of the Bahama Islands, 1833-35. JP for Co. Louth; High Sheriff of Co. Louth, 1841. While on honeymoon in Rome in 1843 he bought, with some other Jacobite relics, a volume of reflections and private devotions in the hand of King James II, printed for the Roxburghe Club in 1925; the original is now in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. He married, 12 January 1843 at Leamington Spa (Warks), Elizabeth Catherine (1820-1904), daughter and heiress of Richard Molesworth Reynell, of Reynells (Co. Westmeath), and had issue: 
(1) Blayney Reynell Townley Balfour (1845-1928) (q.v.); 
(2) Rt. Rev. Francis Richard Townley Balfour (1846-1924), born at Sorrento (Italy), 21 June 1846; educated at Harrow, Trinity College, Cambridge (MA 1872) and Cuddesdon Theological College; ordained deacon, 1872 and priest, 1874; undertook missionary work for the Society for the Propogration of the Gospel in Basutoland (now Lesotho) and South Africa from 1875, and became a fluent speaker of Sesotho, into which language he translated the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer; chaplain to Bishop of Bloemfontein, 1875-82; canon of Bloemfontein, 1884-1901; Archdeacon of Bloemfontein, 1901-06 and of Basutoland, 1908-22; he was consecrated an Assistant Bishop in the diocese of Bloemfontein in 1911 and was thus effectively the first Anglican bishop in Basutoland; died at Shankill (Co. Dublin), 3 February 1924 and was buried in the grounds of Mellifont Abbey (Co. Louth); will proved in Dublin (estate £10,499); 
(3) Catherine Florence Agnes Balfour (1858-1912), born 17 January 1858; died unmarried at Shankill (Co. Dublin), 13 January 1912; will proved in Dublin, 29 February 1912 (estate £11,307); 
(4) Mary Henrietta Balfour (1860-1937), born 23 October 1860; died in Shankill (Co. Dublin), 24 August 1937; her will was proved in London, 6 December 1937 (estate £13,298). 
He inherited Townley Hall from his father in 1856, but seems to have spent much of his time in England, usually in London or Bristol. 
He died 5 September 1882; his will was proved in Dublin, 20 December 1882 (effects in Ireland, £20,723) and in London, 15 January 1883 (effects in England £337). His widow died 9 January 1904; her will was proved in Dublin, 25 February 1904 (estate in Ireland, £9,641) and sealed in London, 5 March 1904 (estate in England, £7,322). 
 
Townley Balfour, Blayney Reynell (1845-1928). Elder son of Blayney Townley Balfour (1799-1882) and his wife Elizabeth Catherine, daughter and heiress of Richard Mackworth Reynell, of Reynells (Co. Westmeath), born in Dublin, 15 April 1845. Educated at Harrow, Trinity College, Cambridge (matriculated 1866; BA 1871; MA 1874) and Middle Temple (admitted 1879). JP and DL for Co. Louth; High Sheriff of Co. Louth, 1885, 1908. “His manner was somewhat reserved and distant, but his disposition was thoroughly kind and charitable” and he was noted for his philanthropic activities, both in Co. Louth and for national and international causes. He was a Member of the Royal Irish Academy from 1890 and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, and wrote several works about the antiquities of Drogheda; he was also responsible for instigating the repair of the monument on the site of the Battle of the Boyne. He married, 24 January 1906 at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, Madeline Elizabeth (1867-1955), elder daughter of John Kells Ingram LLD, Vice-Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, but had no issue. 
He inherited the 3,173 acre Townley Hall estate from his father in 1882, but in 1908 he became one of the first landowners to sell the majority of the estate to his tenants under the Wyndham Act. He retained only the 856 acre demesne, which was sold to him under the Act, allowing him to claim a £14,000 advance of purchase money and a 12% bonus, and subsequently to make annual repayments; this device – allowed as an incentive to landowners – enabled him to invest in estate improvements. At his death the house and remaining estate passed to his widow, who left it to her cousin, David Crichton, who sold it 1957 to Trinity College, Dublin. 
He died 21 October 1928; will proved in London, 11 March 1929 (effects in England £39,606), in Dublin, 5 April 1929 (effects in Ireland £39,282), in Belfast, 13 May 1929 (effects in Northern Ireland £890) and confirmed in Scotland, 31 May 1929 (effects in Scotland £1,278). His widow died 25 March 1955; her will was proved in Dublin, 3 August 1955 (estate £52,246). 
 

Sources 

 
Burke’s Landed Gentry of Ireland, 1912, pp. 24-25; Anon., ‘Two Residences of the Townley Family in Co. Louth’, Journal of the County Louth Archaeological Society, 1924, pp. 267-269; A. Rowan, The buildings of Ireland: North-West Ulster, 1979, p. 359; M. Bence-Jones, A guide to Irish country houses, 2nd edn., 1990, pp. 275-76; C. Casey & A. Rowan, The buildings of Ireland: North Leinster, 1993, pp. 503-08; J. Ingamells, A dictionary of British and Irish travellers in Italy, 1701-1800, 1999, p. 44; E.M. Johnston-Liik, The History of the Irish Parliament, 1692-1800, vol. 3, pp. 130-31, vol. 6, pp. 425-28. 
 

Location of archives 

 
Balfour family of Balfour Castle (Fermanagh): deeds, estate and legal papers, 17th-19th cents. [Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, D1939] 
Balfour family of Townley Hall (Louth): deeds, estate and family papers, 17th-20th cents. [National Library of Ireland, D971, D1902, D2624; T3763; MS3771] 
 

Coat of arms 

 
Townley Balfour of Townley Hall: Quarterly, 1st and 4th, argent, on a chevron sable, an otter’s head erased, of the first; 2nd and 3rd, argent, a fesse sable, in chief three mullets of the second. 
 

Notes about missing information and help wanted with this entry 

• If anyone can provide an image of Piedmont Hall (Co. Louth) when it was intact or substantially so, I would be very pleased to see it. I would also welcome any early photographs of Townley Hall, especially views of the interior showing it as it was furnished before it was sold in 1957. 

• If anyone can provide additional genealogical or biographical details about the people mentioned above, or further portraits or photographs of members of the family, I should be very pleased to incorporate them. 

Revision and acknowledgements 

This post was first published 24 October 2018. 

Townley Hall, perhaps the premier country house achievement of Francis Johnston , is a neoclassical wonder near Drogheda in county Louth. It was completed for Blayney Townley Balfour in 1799, the work having taken about 5 years. It’s 2 storey over basement ( although there is also an attic floor with windows hidden behind the tall cornice and from the rear looks 4 storey with the basement exposed ) ,and has 3 seven bay sides each 90 feet in length .The front also has a single storey portico with twined fluted columns. There is a single storey wing in the rear sunken yard which was for kitchen use . 

The external droved ashlar is of the highest standard, the limestone sourced locally, possibly Sheepgrange. 

It’s austere plainness, with the exception of string course and cornice , it’s pure scale, build quality and positioning amalgamate to create a building of beauty and for want of a better description,strength . 

The pond at the front of the house is a relatively speaking recent addition, although there was a pond about 500 yards to the north of the house at one time pre 20th century . 

While Francis Johnston was the principal architect here, it is also known that Blayney Townley Balfour( having completed a grand tour ) ,along with his sister and in laws , greatly contributed to its design and build . 

Balfour and his wife ,Lady Florence Cole from Florence Court in Fermanagh ,designed the Boyne gate lodge ( it was one of 3) themselves circa 1819. 

Balfour had discussed details at one stage with a Scottish architect James Playfair, but in the end went with Johnston . It was I believe perhaps Johnstons first major solo commission . 

The central rotunda , glass dome and staircase are especially magnificent . The seemingly magically floating ascent to the stars adorned with niches, apses ,recesses 

and decorative plasterwork leave one agog and in awe. My photos and description do it no justice. The Pantheon in Rome springs to mind perhaps. 

The daring way in which the steps of the stairs in essence support one after another with only stability support from the wall has to be applauded not only for their beauty, but also perhaps their bravery. 

The internal doors, made from Cuban mahogany bear no hinges, but use steel pivots top and bottom, window shutters with movements that mesmerise , a gothic shaft in the lower hall( plumbed) to support the portland stone floor above are just a few examples showing the difference between this house and many others as regards details . I am also informed the house was one of the first in Ireland to have inside toilet facilities. 

Blayney Townley Balfour had inherited the estate from his grandfather ( same name).The old house had stood a short distance north of  

the new house. The family had large land holdings in Louth and Meath and made a fortune from a mill in Slane. Later , in the 1870s they owned over 3,000 acres in Louth and almost 1,500 in Meath. 

The Townley family origins were at Townley Hall in Lancashire, the Balfours were from Burleigh in Scotland. 

The Townley Balfour family motto was  

Omne solum forti patria ( roughly translates to -every land is home for the brave man ) 

Our “first ” Blayney Townley had added Balfour to his name after inheriting a large amount from his nephew ( I think) William Balfour . He married his cousin Mary who had inherited the old Townley hall from her father Hamilton Townley . It was this man , then Blayney Townley Balfour that left the estate to his grandson , the builder of the house we see today . That grandson had been an MP ( for Belturbet) , a magistrate in Louth and Meath , High Sheriff in 1792 and DL in his old age 1852. 

His son , another Blayney Townley Balfour inherited , having been Governor of the Bahamas 1833-35. It was subsequently his son who was then the last to live at a Townley Hall. He was Blayney Reynold Townley Balfour . In the 1901 census he and his wife Madeline ( 22 years his junior )were in residence with 8 servants . It reported there were 42 rooms in use. 

When the widowed Mrs Townley Balfour died in 1954 , she left the place to a family relative , David Crichton ( possibly connected to the Crichton family at Crom Castle, but that is speculative on my part ).He sold the house and it’s by then 850 acres to Trinity College Dublin for use as an agricultural college . Subsequently they sold off most of the land to the land commission and forestry Dept. The house and about 60 acres were bought by Frank Mitchell , a Trinity lecturer ,in the late 1960s. He sold it to the School of Philosophy and Economic Science who use and maintain it nowadays . The house is of course a private property and I am grateful for the permission to visit and photograph. 

https://lvbmag.wpcomstaging.com/2025/12/17/francis-johnston-townley-hall-tullyallen-louth/

Thrill of the Chaste 

An immaculate concept, a gorgeous late Georgian flowering. Townley Hall deep in the Boyne Valley came about in the closing years of the 18th century. Its architect Francis Johnston designed Rokeby Hall, 17 kilometres north of Townley Hall, a decade earlier in 1786. The former is a smaller version of the latter. Both are of a spare patrician architecture so appealing to the modern eye. Plain planes. Townley is an achingly svelte seven bay by seven bay 27.5 metre square block.

The architect conceals and reveals scale and massing as the viewer moves round the outside. This is a four storey house masquerading on three sides as a two storey building. Attic dormers lurk behind a solid parapet in a similar arrangement to the contemporaneous Castle Coole, County Fermanagh, except there the dormers peep through balustraded gaps in the parapet. Townley is Castle Coole taken to next level Grecian severity in a case of keeping up with the Lowry-Corrys. Francis’ brother Richard was the original architect for Castle Coole: he was replaced by the celebrity architect James Wyatt. There is another Fermanagh link: the client Blayney Townley Balfour married Lady Florence Cole in 1794. She was from Florence Court, a neighbouring estate of James Wyatt’s masterpiece.

Townley Hall is an essay in structural rationalism, a formal stone box grounded by rolling countryside. Recent semiformal planting softens the grey to green juxtaposition. Unencumbered by unnecessary architectural frippery, Francis employs taut lines. He let’s go – just a little – with the kitchen wing. A collection of curves carefully enriches the wing’s fenestration: recessed arches, roundheaded windows, segmental arched tripartite mezzanine windows, a bow window. It’s not just an august purity auguring minimalism that defines Townley. Workmanship and materiality are also top notch. The facing ashlar was quarried from nearby Sheephouse. It has lower absorbency than most limestone. Mortar is barely visible between the masonry. Metal rods reinforce the slimmest of glazing bars. A mid storey string cornice and Greek Doric eaves cornice relieve the expanse of wall.

A tetrastyle Doric portico leads into the entrance hall which has twin Doric chimneypieces – more restrained versions that those in Castle Coole. That’s a theme developing in this article. Rectangular plasterwork wall panels resemble vast empty picture frames. A coffered ceiling adds to the room’s crisp angularity. Straight ahead – silent drum roll – is the rotunda, a nine metre diameter glass domed cylinder forming the core of the house. A swagger of genius. A swoop of plasterwork swags and skulls. Irish design at its most suave. All the plasterwork whether naturalistic or geometric is of shallow relief. There are two coats of paint on the rotunda walls: the current 1920s creamy beige over the original stone grey. The ribbed dome casts a spidery web of shadows which leisurely climbs the staircase as the afternoon progresses.

An interlinking ceiling rose pattern in the drawing room is similar to the overhead plasterwork of the dining room in Castle Coole. Like all the main rooms around the rotunda it is 7.3 metres deep. This layout allows all the main rooms to have natural light while the rotunda is top lit. Rokeby Hall is similarly laid out and equally bright. It is an efficient arrangement removing the need for corridors. Andrea Palladio’s 1560s Villa Rotundaoutside Vicenza is an obvious source of inspiration although the dome of Townley is hidden behind the attic floor rather than being on full display. Surprisingly Francis’ drawings illustrate the final rationality of layout and simplicity of design was achieved through an evolutionary process. For example, the more elaborate Ionic order (which James Wyatt used for the portico of Castle Coole) was replaced with the plainer Greek Doric for the portico. Francis was clearly a master of the Golden Ratio.

A set of early 1900s photographs (courtesy of the Irish Architectural Archive: reproduced here for non commercial educational purposes) includes views of the interior. Furnishings were suitably classical and restrained. Chinese wallpaper in the south facing drawing room is a rare flush of extravagance. The boudoir and dressing room over the drawing room overlook the parkland. They are one of five family suites clustered around the first floor rotunda landing. On the floor above, the view from the servants’ dormitories is the backside of the parapet below a sliver of sky. The only unobstructed attic windows are in the west facing barrack room which looks down into the courtyard: guards needed to be on watch.

In 1957 the family sold the house and 350 hectare estate to Trinity College Dublin for use as an agricultural school. Since 1977, Townley and its immediate 60 hectares has been a residential study centre owned by the School of Philosophy and Economic Science. A single level extension (visible as one storey on the north front) was recently completed over the kitchen wing plus a double height access link to the original house. The two main conservation schools of thought are to either design an extension that blends in with the host building or one that contrasts with it. The current Irish notion strongly favours the latter. Oh the architectural profession’s fear of that ultimate sin: pastiche! That’s despite every other modern glass building being derived from Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut and its 70 year old ilk. RKD Architects of Newmarket Dublin secured planning permission for an extension that consisted of similar massing to that executed except the courtyard facing elevation was a dormered mansard. RKD proposed Georgian style sash windows throughout.

Treasa Langford of Dúchas Heritage Service commented on the application, “The finishing of the north wall is not specified; however, the construction is specified as exposed uncoursed rubblestone, which would appear to be inappropriate on a cut stone house such as Townley Hall. We would recommend a ruled and lined nap lime plaster finish without use of cement.” Her opinion is based on the view of sympathetically blending old and new. It could be counterargued that rubblestone would be suitably subservient to the cut stone of the grand main block, emphasising the ancillary nature of the wing.

A decade later, MVK Architects of Fitzwilliam Square Dublin’s design also secured planning permission and this time it was built out. Their approach is very different. The design concept is to add an identifiably contemporary layer to this historic property. Subordination and deference are common themes of both practices’ thinking. MVK’s has neither a mansard nor Georgian style glazing bars but the window openings are classically positioned and proportioned.

Michael Kavanagh of MVK Architects relates, “The choice of material was based on aesthetic as well as practical considerations. Natural zinc has a light grey colour – from historic photographs it appears the slate on the original roof had a similar light grey colour. The material is not intended to match the limestone colour but rather be complementary to it. Zinc is natural, hardwearing, long lasting and difficult to puncture. These characteristics make it ideal for long term weatherproofed cladding. It is stiffer than lead or copper and consequently allows for the crispness of detailing which is intended throughout.” This metal envelope is fixed on plywood decking across battens to form a ventilation zone. The zinc is fitted in strips of varying widths using a staggered but repeating rhythm which reflects the use of differently sized limestone blocks on the main house exterior.

The best example in Ireland of a Modernist addition to a neoclassical building is of course the Ulster MuseumBelfast extension. Edinburgh architect James Cumming Wynnes won the 1913 competition for the original museum. The exterior displays fairly ornate Beaux Arts decoration. In 1964, London architect Francis Pym won a competition to extend the museum. His highly inventive design is at once contextual and disruptive. He draws out the neoclassical detailing such as cornices and string courses which then collide with abstract cubic concrete blocks expressing the layout of the galleries inside. Francis’ dramatic work is unsurpassed in its genre. Surprisingly, he worked in church conservation and his only other recorded built form is a gazebo somewhere in England.

This is an article of superlatives. The O’Connell Wing of Abbey Leix in County Laois is a study in how to do it right. Architect John O’Connell’s masterful 1990s reimagining of an unfinished 1860s wing by Thomas Henry Wyatt (an Anglo Irish distant next generation relation of James) is a lesson in improving what’s there already. Client Sir David Davies explains, “This extension was never built as planned but the remains of the Wyatt scheme – a low unadorned wall to the right of the main house was a disfiguring distraction, an issue O’Connell resolved by puncturing the walls with windows and adding architectural ornament.” John O’Connell was also responsible for the late 20th century restoration of Castle Coole. This is an article of connections.

Sympathetic contextual additions; visibly contemporary extensions; dramatic architectural interventions; subtly remodelled wings – they all have their place and supporters. English Poet Laureate and architectural historian Sir John Betjeman once stated, “I have seen many Irish houses, but I know none at once so dignified, so restrained and so original as Townley Hall in County Louth.” More than 230 years after it was finished, such is the strength of Francis Johnson’s design, capturing the spirit of a future age, it still possesses dignity, restraint and originality.

https://www.igs.ie/conservation/project/townley-hall

Designed by Francis Johnston for Blaney Balfour in 1794, Townley Hall, Co. Louth, is considered one of his finest works. The home was passed down through the Balfour family over the centuries and finally was purchased by Trinity College, Dublin in 1956. The house is set on a prominent site in parklands which, in 1827, were called by Gardener’s Magazine, “one of the most magnificent demesnes in the kingdom.” In 2003 the owners applied to the Irish Georgian Society for funding to repair the faulty rotunda flashings and the damage caused by water ingress. The Society supplied over €6,435 for these projects. 

Brief description of project: The rotunda roof flashings had caused significant damage to the structural ring beam at wall plate level. Not only was the structural integrity of the splendid dome compromised, but original, decorative plaster detailing was affected as well. Thanks in part to the Society’s donations, it was possible to erect a temporary cover which enabled the repair of the roof structure using best practice techniques. 

Architectural description: Townley Hall is a two-storey, square building of seven bays. The west elevation has a kitchen which features deep-set windows and Grecian Doric columns. The exterior of the house was completed in a restrained manner with the roof concealed behind a parapet and few decorative effects but for a string course and cornice and a Doric single storey portico to the front. However, the interior is simply but masterfully executed, the main attraction being the central, coffered rotunda and spiral, cantilever staircase. Around the upper level of the rotunda are apses, niches, and arched recesses.

Grants Awarded:

2003: €6,435 from IGS toward faulty rotunda flashing and water damage.

NIAH Listing: 

https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/buildings-search/building/13902414/townley-hall-townleyhall-louth

Detached seven-bay two-storey over basement with attic country house, built c. 1800. Tetrastyle Greek Doric portico to east, single-storey three-bay service wing to west. Hipped slate roofs, rolled lead ridge and hips, glass dome to rotunda with replacement copper roof around dome, circular cast-iron downpipes. Tooled limestone ashlar walling, limestone plinth and string courses, denticulated cornice to wall tops east, south and north elevations. Square-headed window openings, limestone sills, painted six-over-six timber sliding sash windows; wrought-iron window guards to basement; three-over-three sliding sash windows to attic west elevation. Greek Doric portico to east, fluted columns, tooled limestone steps and platform, paired engaged fluted columns flanking square-headed door opening, timber five-panel double doors; square-headed door opening to north, painted timber panelled double doors with glass upper panels, painted timber mullioned overlight, concrete bridge to door over basement; round-headed door opening to west, dressed limestone block-and-start surround, painted timber door with glass panels; blocked door openings with Greek Doric columns to west wing. Interior with Portland limestone geometrical-paving to rotunda, stone cantilever staircase, glass dome, stucco centre pieces and cornices, timber panelled shutter boxes and Cuban mahogany doors. Set in own grounds, round pond to east, lawns sloping away to south, outbuildings to north-west.

Appraisal

Designed by Francis Johnston, this monumental Greek Revival house is widely regarded as his masterpiece. Said to have been influenced by the then owner’s, Blayney Townley Balfour, visits to Europe, it displays high-quality stone masonry, particularly to its portico whose Greek Doric entablature is reflected in the denticulated cornice of the house. Situated on an elevated site it is surrounded by sloping lawns and a complex of outhouses to the north-west. The distinguishing feature of Townley Hall is the airy rotunda with its particularly pleasing cantilevered staircase, but more subtle features such as the mahogany doors are also expertly crafted.

References to IGS Bulletins and Journals:

‘Bulletin XXX 1987 Issue 1’

Irish Georgian Society bulletin XXX — 1987
About Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies

B U L L E T I N O F T H E

IRISH GEORGIAN SOCIETY

VOL. X X X 1987

T H E CONTENTS

E V O L U T I O N O F H A L L

by

Frank Mitchell

T O W N L E Y

‘ There are few occupations more enjoyable than Building’

Lady Louisa Conoily, 1HM

T H E B A L F O U R F A M I L Y (sec table)

Blayney Townley Balfour III was ‘the Begetter’ of Francis

Johnston’s Townley Hall, and so the story must begin when he first

emerges as a person in his own right. This was in 1786 when he

entered Trinity College, Oxford, at the age of 17, to read law.

Blayney was born, not in old Townley Hall, but in the family’s

Dublin town house in Granby Row, on 28 May 1769. His father,

Blayney Townley Balfour II, died two and a half years later, leaving

as well as Blayney, Anna Maria (Anne) (b. 1770), and Mary Frances

(a posthumous child). Blayney was reared by his mother Letitia,

born a Leigh of Drogheda.

Letitia seems to have been a competent and formidable lady, with

a fortune of £10,(XX) in her own name. She died in 1838 at the age of

ninety-two, having buried her father-in-law, Blayney Townley

Balfour I, her husband Blayney Townley Balfour II, and her two

daughters; only her son Blayney Townley Balfour III, survived her.

Blayney Townley Balfour I was also a person of character. He was

important in local politics, and sat as M.P. for Carlingford. He was

the ninth child in a family often. The eldest child, Harry Townley,

occupied a family house. Piedmont, on the north shore of Dundalk

Bay, between Dundalk and Greenore. Now a problematical ruin,

the house was probably built in the opening years of the eighteenth

century. Their uncle, William Balfour of Castle Balfour, Lisnaskea,

County Fermanagh, died unmarried in 1739, leaving his name,

arms, and estates to Harry, who became Harry Balfour. Harry’s

only son, William Charles Balfour, died without issue in 1759,

leaving the name, arms, and estates to Blayney, his only survivinguncle, who thus in 1759 became Blayney Townley Balfour I. This

bequest brought him – in addition to the 4,<XK ) acres he already held

in Louth – 4.000 acres in Fermanagh, a large house and its contents,

and doubtless cash as well. In 1823 his grandson, the builder of the

new Townley Hall, sold the Fermanagh estates to the Earl of Erne

for £86,000. ‘

Before he came into this property, Blayney had already taken steps

to consolidate his position by marrying – as her second husband – his

cousin Mary in 1734. Harry and Blayney’s grandfather, Henry

Townley, of Athclare Castle, near Dunleer, County Louth, had in

addition to Blayney of Piedmont (father of Harry and Blayney)

another son, Hamilton, the first of the family to give his address as

Townley Hall; Mary was his heiress.

Thus in 1760 Blayney Townley Balfour I held not only the bulk of

the original Townley lands in Louth, but also very extensive Balfour

lands in Fermanagh. It was no wonder that the old man once

confided in his diary ‘to my sorrow and shame I have spent £1,000 on

furniture in this year’.

Anne Townley Balfour, Blayney’s sister, appears in 1789 when

her mother spent 13s. 6d. having some of her drawings Framed; she

was then nineteen. She was quite skilled in pencil, pen and wash

drawings, and loved thinking up schemes for houses and cottages;

schemes which she would then represent in competent architectural

drawings. There are many drawings and jottings by her in the

Townley Hall collection of drawings.

Anne would have had instruction in perspective drawing in the

schoolroom, and this interest remained with her, as there are

perspective drawings by her on paper watermarked as late as 1808. A

note-book with watermark 1794 contains many plans and elevations

for cottages. Even earlier (before her marriage in 1793) is a

competent drawing of a house in Harpenden, Herts. The house still

stands – and is being meticulously restored by the Aldwyck Housing

Association. Again, before her marriage she obtained through a

Dublin bookseller an engraved plate out of an unrecorded

eighteenth-century large volume showing sections through the roof

of the Barracks in Carrick-on-Shannon; this may have served as an

example of roof-trusses, and many drawings of roof-trusses occur in

her papers.

One of the sheets of paper on which Anne drew house-plans has

on its opposite side an outline drawing (fig. 1) of a modest house of

the early eighteenth century. It may well represent the first state of

old Townley Hall.

Blayney Townley Balfour I substantially enlarged the house in

1771-3, when he was already in his late sixties. He added two wings,

and raised the old house by one storey. The estimate tor the workFigure I Old Townley Hall – ? (Ml).

/References after captions to the illustrations refer to Townley Hall Drawings in the Irish

Architectural Archive and in the Sational Library IFigure 2 Old Townley Hall, with added wings, seen in the backround of The

Obelisk, after Paul Sandby. c. 1780(unfortunately undated) survives, and the altered house can be seen

in the background of Paul Sandby’s picture of The Boyue Obelisk (fig.

2). Some artistic licence must be involved as the house could not have

been visible from the obelisk.

The drawing-room must have been handsome. It had ‘Weinscot

and Succo’, and the floor was of planks ‘done in the best manner’; a

final note says that the finishing of the inside of the drawing-room

must be ‘in a very handsome’ manner’. Ustice, Ustace (Eustace ?).

probably of Drogheda, was the ‘Plasterer and Stuccoman”.

The household consisted of Blayney. his widowed sister. Mrs

Bury, his widowed daughter-in-law Letitia, and her three children.

Blayney. Anne, and Mary. It seems a pity that the embellishments

should only have had a life of about thirty-five years, as they were all

swept away when the Francis Johnston house was completed. A sign

of the times was that the old house had an armoury, with ’21 Mus-

ketts and Bajonnits’, held in reserve for the local militia.

There was, of course, a gap ot sixty-tour years between young

Blayney and his grandfather, and the young man, when he came into

the property, may have felt that something more up-to-date was im-

perative. Blayney Townley Balfour III did not proceed to a degree in

Oxford, where he appears to have used Trinity College as a base for

sociaractivity. with his servant and his horse at hand. However, he

did make a visit to Slough to see Herschel making his telescope.

In 1788 he was at Orbe, not far north of Lausanne in Switzerland,

in some sort of tutorial establishment, where he paid £70 a quarter. In

addition he paid small fees to a professor Trallen, to a German mas-

ter, and to a dancing-master. There seems to have been a small group

of young gentlemen, some English, some Irish, in Orbe. One of the

latter was Thomas Vesey Dawson, a scion of the wealthy Dawson

family of Dawson’s Grove, later Dartrey House, near Cootehill: he-

entered the church and married Blayney s sister, Anne, in 1793; her

fortune was £7,000. He must have been a family friend, as when he

and Blayney were in Switzerland, he was commissioned to purchase

a watch for Anne in Geneva.

From Orbe Blayney set out on a post-chaise tour of Europe,

which took him as far as Dresden and Marseilles. His grandfather

died on 18 August 1788, when Blayney was still legally a minor. He

did not interrupt his tour, and his mother took over the running of

the property. But he did return to old Townley Hall for his commg-

of-age, which took place on 28 May 1790.

Balfour, both because of the family property in Fermanagh, and

because of his close friendship with Armar Lowry Corry. first Earl

of Bel more – he was later to be Armar’s executor and trustee-would

have been a frequent visitor to Enniskillen. The rebuilding of

Castlecoole must have been of very great interest to him. The found-ation stone ot the great neo-classical house was laid on 17 June 1790,

less than a month after Blayney had come of age. Armar had first of

all engaged Richard Johnston, older brother of Francis, who had an

established position as an architect in Dublin. But after Richard’s

plan had been accepted and the foundations dug, Armar switched to

the fashionable English architect of the day, James Wyatt. Johnston

was dropped, and the house was erected to Wyatt’s design, though

Wyatt never saw the site or the house.

In 1790, Wyatt had been practising for twenty years. Robert

Adam had only two more years to live. New ideas of Greek, or what

came to be called Regency, simplicity were beginning to dawn. In

Castlecoole we see Wyatt beginning to move towards the Greek re-

vival for exteriors and away from elaborate detail in interior decora-

tion.

Richard Johnston’s younger, and later more famous, brother,

Francis, was already building actively in the Drogheda area on behalf

of Primate Robinson, later to become Lord Rokeby, a landed prop-

rietor in Louth. Thomas Cooley, who was the Primate’s architect,

must have delegated the work on the Louth estate to Johnston, and

when Cooley died in 1788, Johnston succeeded him. His first task in

Louth was a mansion for the Primate, and he designed and built

Rokeby Hall, the work starting in 1784. He must have set up an

office at Rokeby as there are plans for cottages and houses at Clon-

more. County Louth, dated from Rokeby Hall in 1792 and 1793, and

for thatched cottages at Townley Hall, dated from Rokeby Hall,

June 1793.

P L A N N I N G T H E H O U S E

On his return to Drogheda, having seen Castlecoole started,

Belfour must have asked Johnston to let him have suggestions for a

house. There is in the Townley Hall collection of drawings a ‘Sketch

for an House – November 30, 1790 FJ’, on scale 16′:1″. The house

(fig.3) measured 70′ x 60′, and is in elevation a slightly more

imposing version of Rokeby Hall; the ground floor plans are

essentially similar. A long kitchen-wing and a semi-circular

courtyard lay at one side of the house. There are also two other

versions of the ground floor plan, not in Johnston’s style, and

perhaps drawn by Blayney and Anne. In the Johnston plan the hall is

very deep (32′ deep and 20’4″ across), and a circle in pencil has been

drawn in at the back of the hall, where the plan shows the columns

characteristic of the period; do we here see the first suggestion of the

inner circular hall that is such a feature of Townley Hall as ultimately

erected?

The following spring the whole family, together with their

friends, the Coopers, decided to go on an extended European tour,

10

B2Figure 3 Francis Johnston. Novr. 30. 1790. Sketch for an House (M2)

11largely following the route already taken by Blayney. Anne tells us

that ‘the Coopers, Balf, Mary, Anne and dearest mother’ left Dublin

on 6 May 1791, travelling “in at least two vehicles. The ladies of the

family turned back from Nice, arriving in England on 28 March

1792; Blayney alone went further on to Italy. •

In a letter from Nice dated 11 November 1791, Mrs Balfour tells

us ‘B has had his carriage on board a Felucca near a week, and is

unluckily detained by the weather … he means to visit Genoa, Turin,

Milan, Naples etc. and has scarce time for what is to be seen, as the

heats become insupportable in May.’

Blayney started a travel journal ‘Tour through Italy begun in the

month of November, 1791′, but the surviving part only extends as

far as Florence. It reads mainly like an extract from Baedeker, but he

did visit villas and picture galleries, and doubtless developed his taste

for neo-classicism. He tells us that ‘Ld Bristol has a man at Modena

copying for him.’

Balfour was in Rome in the spring of 1792 where his path crossed

that of the distinguished Scottish architect, James Playfair, who

made an Italian tour in 1792-3. Playfair has been summarised by

Howard Colvin as ‘an elegant architectural designer with a strong

predilection for a refined neo-classical simplicity’. His most

impressive surviving house is Caimess in Aberdeenshire.

Balfour must have called to his studio in April, and inspected

Playfair’s suggestions for villas of varying pretensions. A relatively

modest one struck his fancy, and Playfair noted on it ‘Sketch of a

design for Balfour Esq April 13, 1792 J. Playfair Arch Rome”.

Balfour also asked for a portfolio of further suggestions. Playfair’s

office journal for 30 July 1792 shows the entry ‘made a plan for Mr

Balfour of Ireland 50gn’. A portfolio of drawings (see p.3) was

despatched to Balfour, and paid for by him on 1 February 1793.

The portfolio contained three designs. The most modest, already

noted in Rome, offered alternative ground-floor plans, one 66′ x 82′

and the second 6S’ x 79′; neither offered substantially more rooms

than the plan already submitted by Johnston. The second design is

70′ x 90′. The third design is 96′ x 56′. In all three plans the kitchen

offices are separate, and at a distance from the house.

Though Balfour had shown a preference for design one when in

Rome, it is clear that Playfair thought he would decide on design two

(fig.4), for in the portfolio it is given in much more detail. All the

floors are shown on three sheets of plans, whereas the other two

designs have only one sheet, and show the ground floor only. The

portfolio is now in the National Monuments Record of Scotland.

Balfour was back inlreland in October 1792, and he does not seem

to have pursued the matter of Playfair further. But he did pursue the

matter of demolishing the old house, the greenhouses, and the farm

12Figure 4 James Playfair, Rome. I7V2. projected villa tor Ujllour14

Figure 5 Francis Johnston, undated, first plan for principal floor ( M i l )Figure 6 Francis Johnston, undated, first elevation for north-east facade

(AD 1872)

15buildings, and replacing them by buildings more to the modern

taste. He turned again to Johnston, who provided him with an

estimate of £995.12.7 for a barn, sheds, and a haggard in May 1793,

and two alternative estimates for ‘your plan- for a house, £10,473 for

cut stone on three sides, or £9,779 for rough stone and rough cast in

January 1794. Balfour decided to have cut (i.e. chisel-surfaced)

stone. What had happened between October 1792 and January 1794?

Balfour had stayed in many country houses in England and

Ireland, and had collected architectural plans. In the Townley Hall

collection, there is an engraving for which an attractive maroon ink

was used, ofKirby Hall, Ouseburn. Yorks (W.R.). Mrs Thompson,

the wife of the owner, Stephen Thompson, was a very close friend of

Blayney’s mother, and Mrs Balfour, and perhaps Blayney also, will

have known the house well. Mr Thompson was closely involved in

the development of the house, whose elevation was designed by R.

Morris and the Earl of Burlington. It was erected about 1750 by J.

Carr. and regrettably demolished in 1920.

There is also a late plan dated 1828 of Newby Hall with he letter G

surmounted by a coronet, which means it was drawn by a later Lord

Grantham than the second baron who was architecturally active in

Figure 7 Balfour jnd his lister. Anne – ?, undated, modifications to elevation tor

entrance facade, (Al) 1<X>2 )

16the middle ot the eighteenth century. The house, now known as

Baldersby Park. Yorks (W.R.). is a most important one; begun

about 1720, it was added to by Sir William Chambers and by Robert

Adam. The Granthams were friends of the Balfour family and

Blayney may have seen this house also.

There are prints giving elevations, plans, and sections of the New

Church of Ste. Genevieve (built 1764, now the Pantheon) and of the

New Comedie Francaise (now the Odeon) in Paris. There are pages

from a pattern book of designs for cottages and stables by Benjamin

and Samuel Wyatt published by Lewis Wyatt in 1801.

Balfour was clearly in a position to get what he wanted

architecturally. He probably said to Johnston that a pastiche of

Rokeby would not do. He wanted a larger house with a simple neo-

classical exterior, its interior focussed on a circular stair-case hall,

covered above by a dome. The concept for such a rotunda could have

come from that in Wyatt’s London Pantheon, or nearer home from

that in the Royal Exchange (now City Hall) in Dublin, by Johnston’s

former master, Thomas Cooley.

Johnston then proceeded to prepare plans and elevations,

unfortunately undated, but which must lie between October 1792

and January 1794. There are plans for three floors (the attics are

omitted) which are on the same small scale (16′: 1″ ) and in the same

style that Johnston had used for his undated drawings of Rokeby

Hall and his first drawing for Balfour of 1790. There is a side

elevation on a larger scale, but the front elevation has not survived.

However it is clear from the plans that all the windows were to be the

same, and there was a portico carried on four columns (fig. 5). The

surviving elevation (fig. 6) shows that there were to be eight

chimney-stacks. A narrow string-course linked the bottoms of the

upper windows, with a broader string-course below. The house was

essentially square (86′ x 83′) and of four storeys (the top or attic floor

being concealed by a parapet). Like Rokeby Hall, the house faced

north-west. A two-storey kitchen-wing, attached to the house, also

included extensive accommodation for servants. From the upper

room which abutted against the house a door opened into what was

to be Mr Balfour’s Own room, thus providing him with a Wardrobe.

The wing looked across a narrow yard to a range of sheds including

poultry-houses.

In the middle of the house there was a stair-case hall, 25′ in

diameter, but this was D-shaped on the ground floor, becoming

circular at first level – surely an awkward arrangement. The floor of

the hall was supported by a circular wall in the basement.

While feeling that Johnston was now on the right lines, Balfour

was not satisfied. He did not like the aspect, he did not like the

treatment of the stair-case hall, he did not like the eight chimney

17stacks, he thought the portico pretentious, he did not like the

kitchen-wing, and he liked Wyatt windows. So he. or perhaps his

sister Anne – who as we have already seen was an accomplished

draftsman – set to work to alter Johnston’s scheme, and to redraw the

plans and elevations on the scale of 10′: 1″.

The house was turned to face east, a modest hall-door had two

engaged Ionic columns supporting a lintel (fig. 7), rather similar to

the entrance to the Plunkett house, Louth Hall, about fourteen miles

to the north. The chimney-stacks were reduced to four, and the

string-courses were omitted. On both the ground floor and the first

floor on the principal front Wyatt windows replaced some |ohnston

regular w’indows.

It is possible that it was Anne who introduced the Wyatt windows,

as the house at Galtrim (fig. 8) that Johnston built for her and her

husband very shortly afterwards, had a pair of Wyatt windows at the

back. At Galtrim the hall-door and flanking windows were

separated by engaged Greek Doric columns, reminiscent of the

rejected Townley Hall portico. McParland feels that there is a strong

Gandon influence in the Galtrim design.

Anne had married Vesey Dawson on 6 November 1783, and in the

following year he Became vicar of the parishes of Galtrim and

Culmullen in County Meath. Galtrim was about twenty-five miles

from Townley Hall. The couple decided to get Johnston to build

them a house beside the church at Galtrim, and Dawson records that

the house was complete by 1799. The house was known to the

Dawsons as Fort Weston (there is a Norman mote nearby), but the

next occupant renamed it Galtrim House, as it is known today. The

change has caused confusion; Betjeman thought there were two

different houses. Johnston also designed a glebe house (not executed)

for Galtrim parish. In 1803 Dawson acquired the benefice of

Ematris, the parish of the family seat at Dawson Grove.

Anne immediately brought Johnston down to Dawson Grove,

but I do not know if he did any work there. The house is demolished,

but one stable yard might be by Johnston. Dawson moved on to

Lough Gilly, Co. Armagh, in 18(MS . The rectory there was a three-

storey block, and Johnston was sent for again. To the ends of the

house he added two-storied blocks, linked by a corridor across the

front of the old house. Part of the north block survived the

demolition of the house. There is a photograph of the house in the

Armagh County Museum;Johnston’s drawings and Anne’s sketches

arc there also. There must have been a good rapport between them.

On the principal floor of the proposed Townley Hall, the Balfours

(fig. 9) abolished a narrow passage or closet that Johnston had behind

his D-shaped hall, thus enabling the hall to move back into the

geometric centre of the house, and become circular. Its diameter was

IK

< 2Figure K (Ijltnni House (formerly Fort Weston). front and rear elevations from a

sketch-book of Anne l>awson (now at ti.iltrnii House)Figure ‘) Ualfour and his sister. Anne – ?, undated, modifications tor principal floor

Wyau windows jre shown at the front of the house (M14)

2(1increased to 30′. and the house became 9O’ square, to accommodate

the enlarged hall. Again behind the hall Johnston had a bed-room,

and this was turned into a breakfast-room. Windows were opened

up on the back wall of Mr Balfour’s study. The position of some

fireplaces was changed to make it possible to halve the number of

chimney-stacks.

In proposing to open out windows in the back wall of his Own

Room (or Study) Balfour clearly implied that the kitchen-wing should

not abut against the house. Turning the house around had further

implications for Johnston’s proposal. The slope of the ground is

from north to south, and with Johnston’s house facing north-west,

the fall of the ground meant that the wing was downhill, and so

could be of two storeys, with windows on each side, and include

ample accommodation for servants. Turning the house to face east

meant that Johnston’s wing would have to be sunk into the ground,

and would lose half its windows.

For a start. Balfour thought the wing too big, with too much

servant accommodation. He reduced the latter by reorganising the

basement of the house, and giving a mansard roof to the attic floor,

so as to transfer the servants there. He must have toyed with the idea

of an independent kitchen unit, either in a wing as he had seen at

Castlecoole, or in a separate pavilion as Playfair’s designs suggested.

Johnston was asked for a unit that would be an elegant feature of

proper architectural standing. Johnston replied with a design (fig.

10a) that might have been for an orangery: the central kitchen rising

through both floors might well have held date-palms and bananas.

In the design the end-blocks with their lunette recesses carried on

columns below could conceivably have been suggested by a very

close perusal of the corner pavilions of the kitchen block as shown by

Playfair in one of the plans he submitted to Balfour. Johnston will

have had access to these sketches, but he never saw Cairness in

Aberdeenshirc. At Cairness Playfair placed the house (designed in

1789) in the embrace, as it were, of a semi-circular office block,

whose ends, which appear at each side of the house (fig. 10b) have

some similarity to the end-blocks at Townley Hall.

But Balfour’s idea was defeated by the constraints of the site. The

house had to have a sunken yard at the back to give access to the

basement. If the kitchen-block was transverse to the yard, how could

traffic get around it? In the end the yard was widened, Johnston’s

sheds were placed underground on the downslope side, and the hens

were despatched to the farmyard. In Johnston’s revised April 1794

drawing (fig. 12a), the kitchen-unit again abuts against the house,

and the room in it that Johnston had labelled Wardrobe became a

lobby to the Own Room, with a door to be used by employees

opening to the north.

21Figure HI a) Townley Hall: kitchen-wing (Country Life. I’MK)

b) Caimcss (James l’layfairl, cast Hanking pavilion (Country Life. l’J7l)

22The price paid was that the elegant unit became almost invisible.

From the very few back windows of the house the line of sight

enfilades the kitchen-wing, and a sideways glance cannot do it

justice. To see it requires a special walk, past the south front of the

house to the cliff overhanging the low-level yard. It is only from the

cliff-edge that the viewer can do it the justice it deserves.

Johnston seems to have accepted the alterations in principle, and

proceeded to cost the scheme. On 29 January 1794 he wrote to

Balfour ‘I here send you an Abstract of my Estimation of your plan

… *. This total figure for the house was approximately £10,000, but I

am sure that this figure bore little relation to the final cost of the

house as executed, as there were many changes of plan along the

way. Rokeby Hall is reputed to have cost £30,000.

Balfour must have indicated that the figure was acceptable, and as

early as April in the same year Johnston began to produce plans and

elevations on the scale of 8′:1″, which essentially followed the

fialtour scheme. But Johnston did banish the Wyatt windows on the

principal front, returning to his own uniform fenestration (fig. lla).

This severity immediately threw up the weakness of the Balfour

entrance, where to make matters worse the semi-circular fan-light

clashed hopelessly with Johnston’s rectangularity. In August

Johnston produced a revised elevation (fig. lib), making the door-

opening rectangular and slightly enlarging the surround; a shallow

string-course was added at the level of the top of the cornice over the

door but the window sills above remained separate. At a still later

stage (fig. lie), the portico was reinstated, and as it had mutules,

mutules were added below the main cornice of the house.

Johnston’s revised plan for the principal floor was produced in

April 1794 (fig. 12a). The north face shows an exit at ground level

but this was not constructed; the exit here dates from 1960. Mr

Balfour’s proposed window opes at the back of his Own Room do not

appear, and the kitchen-wing came back against the house. The

breakfast-room has become a billiard-room, and the Boudoir behind

the library has vanished. In the enlarged library, as in the billiard-

room at Carton, four columns support the ceiling, but these were

never constructed – an omission which was perhaps a structural

mistake. In the executed plan (fig. 12b), the narrow single door

linking the library to the drawing-room gives way to a pair of doors.

Similarly in the opening between the two halls, a pair of doors

appear.

In the circular hall the stairs spring anticlockwise from beside the

entry from the front hall, instead of springing clockwise from beside

the door into the library, as executed.

On the first floor, the June 1794 plan shows the principal dressing-

room, for the mistress of the house, without its end recess, though

23Figure I I a) Francis |ohnston, revised elevations for entrance facade lime. 1794

b) August. 1794 (AO 1W.1)

c) Ases.v..-.

: M47

2-1Figure 12 a) Francis Johnston, revised plans for principal floor April. (AD IH62)

b) As executed (MSlI)

25

II26

1)2

Figure 13 Supporting column in basemen! (Country Ijfe. l’MX)this has been sketched in pencil on the plan. The attic floor is

expanded for the nursery, bachelor quests, and some of the servants.

A section through the house, dated April 1795. shows that in the

basement the circular wall that was to support the floor of the round

hall above has disappeared, and been replaced by an elegant cutstone

central column (tig. 13). piped to supplv taps tor servants’ buckets.

A digression may perhaps be made here to describe the water-

supply for the house and the farmyard. The ground around the

immediate precincts slopes gentlv from north to south. About 600

yards north of the house, where the height of the ground had risen to

above the level of the proposed house, extensive shallow ponds were

created. These provided both a reservoir for the house, and open

water where ice could form during periods of frost. An ice-house

was built nearby. From the ponds water was piped to a small service

reservoir, immediately above the farmyard, and still above the level

of the house-roof. From this reservoir water flowed to a large lead

tank at the top of the house. Water from it supplied two water-

closets, one on the bedroom storey, and one on the principal storey;

it also supplied the taps in the basement. A minor point – in the 1794

plans the W.C.s show a pair of seats, in the plans as executed only

one seat is shown.

B U I L D I N G R E C O R D S

The records tor the building of the house that have survived are on

the one hand voluminous, yet on the other are in many ways vague

and imperfect, but I have attempted to thread a way through them.

One important source is a general account book of Balfour’s for

the period 26 May 1794 to 9 Mav 1796. There must have been a

sequence of such books, and it is sad that only one has survived.

Baldfour kept meticulous records of all money that passed through

his hands. He even kept a small jotter (3″ x 4″) in his pocket, to make

immediate notes. Sums entered in it range from £415 principal and

interest on a bill to 4d. for gingerbread. He produced an annual

estimate of his household expenses.

In the general account book he records many payments direct to

contractors, but he also had an agent called Everitt, and many

relatively substantial payments to Everitt appear to be to

recompensate him for payments to contractors. There are also

accounts from contractors certified tor payment by Johnston or by a

quantity surveyor. Thomas Wmslow (Winslone?).

Another Balfour source (Ms NL 1 I.9O1) is a bank pass book listing

bills and drafts debited and credited over the period from 25.6.90 to

8.10.04. Not all the payees are named, but the names of Thomas

Carty (for slates). John Glover (tor stone), Francis Johnston

27(professional fees), Richard Mallett (for ironwork) and Norman

Steele (for timber) can be picked out.

Both the tarm foreman and the farm smith had to keep detailed

logs of work done each day, and the records, though pitifully

sketchy, are invaluable for tracing the progress of the work. The

foreman’s log (Ms NL 9,547) runs from 13.7.97 to 11.1.1800,

covering much of the period of the building of the house, while the

smith’s log (Ms NL 11,923) is still longer, running from 2.6.96 to

4.3.02. But at the same time as the house was being erected, the same

men were also servicing the farm yard and building at Mellifont, and

it is difficult to interpret the laconic entries, scribbled in by a tired and

largely unlettered man at the end of a long day’s work.

There is also in the National Library a miscellaneous collection of

family letters, and a search through these – though I cannot claim to

have seen them all – did provide as well as family chatter a smattering

of references to the progress of the house.

B U I L D I N G THE H O U S E

The work started with the excavation of a hole inside which the

basement would be erected. The hole was one hundred feet square

and at least fifteen feet deep. The excavated material was presumably

stockpiled nearby, to be used later in levelling around the house, or

forming a foundation for the new approach avenue. The rock which

was at the surface at the site was a shattered slate, and would have

yielded easily to blasting. The first purchase of blasting powder was

on June 21, 1794. James Reay (Reye) and Andrew Kindelan were the

contractors; they were probably local men, and received their first

payment on 3July, 1794.

The floor of the basement was substantially below ground level,

and a tunnel had to be driven southwards through rock for a

considerable distance to provide an outfall for the main sewer. Reay

and Kindelan did the ‘Caveing’.

When the excavation was complete, the foundations could be dug,

and this was probably done by the farm labourers. Large quantities

of stone, both cut and uncut, bricks and mortar were then required as

well as the skilled craftsmen to erect the house. Very large quantities

of scaffolding must also have been necessary, and it seems

extraordinary that Johnston only allowed £80 ‘For the use and waste

of scaffolding’. The farm labourers moved the poles, and there are a

few entries for the purchase of ropes and tackle.

The rather coarse Carboniferous limestone used in the house came

from a quarry at Sheephouse. about two and a half miles to the

south-east across the Boyne. Johnston noted it as a stone of good

quality. John Glover, who had provided the stone for the extension

to the old house, again supplied the stone, which was supplied

28punched, tooled or moulded as required. The Glovers must have

been a well-established firm of quarrymen and stone-cutters. The

bills are neither clear nor complete, but John Glover would appear to

have received about £3,075. The quarry must have been worked on a

large scale because there was a constant procession ot farm carts

carrying stone from the quarry to the new house. In 1795 Kindelan

also carted stone.

The bricks were produced on the estate. Towards its eastern end

there is a glacial deposit of lime-free clay with occasional stones. A

brick-kiln was set up here, and the fields in the area are still known as

‘The Brick Fields’ and ‘The Brick House Meadow’. The kiln

produced the bricks for the extensions to the old house, and came

into action again for the new house.

In 1795 James Reay received £211 for ‘drawing Lime & Sand &

mixing the Mortar’ for the basement. He supplied mortar for the

house, the kitchen wing, the underside of the slates, and the flags in

the kitchen yard. He also supplied plaster for the walls, for which he

was paid £169. There must then have been a ‘coolness’ for a

memorandum in Johnston’s hand reads ‘Reay was Discharged on the

day ot (date not tilled in). From which date Townley has supplied the

different buildings with mortar’. In the bills he is described without

comment as ‘Joseph Townley”. He is recorded as supplying ‘Lime,

Sand and Tossing it up into Mortar for the use of the Masons’.

Considerable building of large houses was going on in and around

Drogheda in the late 18th century, and there must have been

competent local craftsmen available. The stone – and brick-work is

in places very complex, and called for a high level of skill. At this

time Andrew Boyd was an important carpenter in Drogheda; he was

admitted freeman in 1798. The smith’s book records work done for

Boyd in October, 1797, and in April, 1798. Boyd was involved in

building the gate lodge in 1819, and in the laundry yard about the

same time. A Drogheda Directory for 1830 lists ‘Andrew Boyd,

house carpenter and builder, 12 Magdalene St.’ As with the Glovers,

there will have been a family firm trading as “Andrew Boyd’, and the

Boyds – as house carpenters and builders – probably were the chief

contractors in the erection of the house. In 1794 ‘Duff received £266.

Stephen Duff, brick-layer and mason, had worked on the old house.

Michael Duff was in the Drogheda building-trade in 1796. Members

of this family may also have worked at Townley Hall. The highest

skill may have been occasionally called for. On November 6. 1797,

one labourer is described as ‘with the Dublin stone-cutter’.

Most of the stone sent by Glover was ready to be inserted into the

building, but some dressing of stone was done on site. The farm

smith spent a lot of time re-sharpening the tools used by the masons

and stone-cutters, and sometimes the labourers assisted in sawing30

Figure M I Viiii.ii>c(i i ImiiiHA-si.uk (mitt rcnstone. The smith occasionally made special fittings, and from his

log-book we can date the erection of the portico to July, 1797. As

WJS usual at the time, an air-space was left between the outer face of

the basement wall on the east and south sides of the house and the

face of the excavated rock to lessen the percolation of ground-water

into the wall. The gap was subsequently arched over to create a

tunnel. The Townley Hall portico was placed on a special

foundation, and the completion ot the driveway in front of the house

was deferred until September, 1799.

The limestone masonry failed only in one detail, the chimney

stacks. Reducing the number of stacks meant that each had to

discharge ten or eleven flues. The stacks were of cut stone, without

chimney-pots and relatively inconspicuous, just as at Galtrim. As the

number and location ot the flues that were discharging hot gases was

not constant, the stacks suffered differential expansion and

contraction, with consequent shattering of the stone. Down the

years attempts were made to hold the stacks together by cramps and

bands, but nothing could stop them disintegrating (fig. 14). They

were demolished in I960 when central heating was installed.

The kitchen-wing was erected in the spring of 1798, as the

foreman’s log-book tells us that on the 3rd of April there were ‘3 men

with 5 cars drawing Coulms for the kitchen’. The south side of the

kitchen-yard, with its subterranean vaulted coal-stores, had been

built earlier. In an effort to keep the stores dry, a layer of impervious

clay was spread over the tops of the arches. The log-book for

November 28, 1797 tells us ‘3 with 3 cars drawing yellow clay for the

Voats”.

The Portland Stone (oolitic limestone) used in the floors of the two

halls, the stairs both main and back, and the landing in the circular

hall, seems to have been imported in a cut and finished state. The

dome of the circular hall was glazed in September, 17%, as the smith

records ‘mounting a step ladder for glazing the circle’. A year later

the foreman notes

19.10.97 4 with cars drawing flags from the Boyne; packing

flags

28.12.97 1 with two cars gone to Dublin for the Landing

stones

26. 2.98 2 with 3 cars drawing Stone stairs

25. 5.98 4 with 5 cars drawing curt stone from Drogheda

The date is confirmed by a record by the smith that on 20.5.98 he

made ‘4 wedges for stairs’. Townley drew lime and sand for ‘1543

feet Sup’, of flagging in Hall, Great Stairs and Gallery’ but no date is

given.

On 12July 1794 Balfour’s General Account Book records’Slates &

ridge tiles Carry £113.0.0′ The Cany is almost certainly Thomas

31Carty of Drogheda who in 1795 was advertising in the local papers

‘Thomas Carty has just landed, and ready for sale, at his Slate-yard

on the South Quay two cargos of very fine Tun and Counting-slates

– which he will sell on reasonable terms’, and again in 1796 ‘Slates.

Ridge &’ Verge Stones, Kiln and Swansea Coals’. In August 1795,

Everitt paid £22.15.0 for slates, and in May 17% someone named

Pntt received £183.15.9 for slates.

The slates used were not purple slates from Wales, though these

were being sold in Drogheda at the time under the name of

Beaumaris slates, shipping presumably being from that port. Heavy

grey slates, perhaps from the Lake District, were used, and they were

carefully graded on the roof slopes. Their colour toned in with the

grey limestone of the house.

The contract for the lead flashing over the circular hall and in the

gutters went to William Pike, whose first invoice is dated 30

September 1795. Pike came from 17 Fleet Street, Dublin, and his

account includes coming and going by stage coach. His total bill

came to £364.11,4, so there may have been other plumbers at work

also.

On 26 May 1796. the sum of £62.10.0 was paid to Mallet,

probably a forerunner of a very famous Dublin firm of ironfounders;

the money may have been for fitting-up the water-closets.

There are a number of entries for ironwork and brazing in

Balfour’s account book, but they are all small sums, totalling only

about £400. Some material may have been bar iron for the farm

smith. Michael Duff of Drogheda was an importer of Swedish iron.

Of a number of other names, Fitzgerald might be either Gerald

Fitzgerald of 44 Mary Street, Dublin, or John Fitzgerald of 23

Charles Street, Dublin; both are described as Tin-plate-workers and

Braziers. Hillis is perhaps James Hilles, of 180 Abbey Street, Dublin.

Fean & Tirrell are also named.

Much of the ironwork was done by the farm smith in the farm

forge; a man called Terney (Tierney?) quit in March, 1797; the name

of his successor is not recorded. The smith re-sharpened the masons’

chisels every day, and also made special fittings when needed, he

made tools for the carpenters, he made nails and slate-cutting tools

for the slaters, he made hods for carrying plaster for the plasterers,

and he made holdfasts for the plumbers. He also made the jacks and

spits for the kitchen.

The smith’s worst problem was the mahogany hand-rail and brass

bannisters in the circular hall. Between October, 1798 and April.

1800, he spent 96 full days trying to get them right; on April 10. !8OO

he noted in triumph “Finished Bannasters of Stairs”. The problem

recurred in 1819 when Andrew Boyd “screwed ballisters of grand

stairs’.

32Figure 1 5 a) Casdccoole (James Wyatt); dining-room (National Trust; 1952)

b Townley Hall; drawing-room (Country Lift, I1M8)

33By September 1796 the roof, with its slates, lead flashing and gljss

dome was in position, and the exterior of the houses must have been

virtually complete.

C O N S T R U C T I O N A L D E T A I L S

Balfour will certainly have included Florence Court, the seat of the

Earl of Enniskillen, during his visits to his estates in Fermanagh. He

was attracted by Lady Florence Cole, later to be his bride, though she

was then only sixteen years old. Castlecoole was complete, and

Balfour will have had opportunity to examine it. and to study

Wyatt’s drawings. Balfour and Lady Florence may have visited

Castlecoole together, and admired the dining-room (fig. 15a). In

Dale’s opinion it offers a foretaste ot Regency chastcness and

elegance, and shows considerable influence from Henry Holland.

The drawing-room at Townley Hall (fig. 15b). which lost its

plaster panels when the Chinese wallpaper* was put up in the

nineteenth century, is remarkably like the dining-room at

Castlecoole, except for the detail of the doors and shutter-boxes

Here (fig. 20b). a central circular panel interrupts the rectangular

panels. This formula first appears in Ireland in the work of Davis

Ducart in the 1760s. and was used by Wyatt in the entrance-doors at

Castlecoole. Johnston took it up enthusiastically, using it in the

drawing-rooms at Townley Hall and Corbalton Hall, in the study

and on the hall door at Galtrim. on the hall door in Slane Castle and in

the ceiling of St George’s Church. Dublin.

The working plan for the carpentry of the bedroom storey, dated

April 1795, requires that ‘strong, clean and well-sized Memcl

timber’ is to be used. Such timber was reaching Drogheda at the

time, as an early nineteenth century advertisement in a Drogheda

newspaper shows:

MEMEL TIMBER

SMYTH & SMYTH

Daily expect the arrival of the brig Elizabeth. Thomas

Thornton, Master, from Memcl with

200 tons crown timber

KXK ) planks 12 & 20 feet long

5 fathoms lathwood

and a few thousand pipestaves

Balfour appears to have joined with Norman Steele. an active

public figure in Drogheda, in importing a special consignment.

•The- wallpaper wit sent from India by Lady Florence’s brother, the Hon. Arthur

Cole, Resident at Mysore By 1V5< > it had decayed bjdlv. and wjs sold The purchaser

brought it to America for cleaning and to Hong Kong tor repair, .ind then found it J

new home in the residence of the American Ambassador in Regent’s I’jrk. London

.14doubtless cut to specified sizes. The planks in the library floor are 45′

long. SVf across and \V*” thick: there are forty-five of them; their

transport alone must have caused special problems. Balfour records

many financial transactions with Steele but two can be linked to

timber :-

12.8.95 1 A Freight 341.0.11

in. 12.95 on a/c timber to Norman Steele 300.0. 0

Steele was not a regular timber merchant; he lived at Moynalty.

Meath, and in November 1796. he was admitted freeman of

Drogheda, receiving a silver-gilt freedom box, because of his

‘spirited and indefatigable exertions as a magistrate”.

The working plans for the floors below the main bedrooms and

the attic rooms show how complex the work was. For the Bed

Chamber Floor Johnston gives precise directions:

‘Strong clean & large sized Memel Timber to be chosen for the

girders, and those for under the partitions to be strongest [over the

Library tor example one girder had to carry not only a partition wall

but also a chimney breast and flue). In cutting out the binding joists

there need be No waste of Timber as they are of different thickness

according to their bearing and in order to prevent Waste of Timber,

their thickness may be varied a little observing to have those of the

Chimney Trimmers and under the partitions of the best timber and

fullest scantling – their wall bearing from 6 to 10 inches -The through

joists to have from 6 to 10 inches Wall hold. And if possible to be

cambered from plate to plate in each Room’. The span was 24 feet.

The main weight was carried on treble girders, built up of two deal

timbers 12″ x (> ” x 6′:” separated by an oak truss; all bolted together.

To achieve the cambering a massive and complex wedge-shaped

piece of iron divided the girder centrally. The erection of such

massive girders must have been a very complicated task. Johnston’s

directions continue “In order to prevent any irregularity or mistake in

bringing the Chimney tunnels to their proper situation The

carpenter to mark out on horizontal pieces fixed for the purpose at

the level ot the underside ot the floors of this storey, the exact

situation of all the timbers bearing in the Chimney Walls and of the

funnels between (as set forth in this plan), from these marks the

Bricklayers Work lines can be led to the respective Chimneys etc

from which the said funnels are to be drawn And every

Precaution must be taken neither to Cramp the funnels in their

Dimentions nor hazard the smallest Danger by placing Timber too

near them ‘

Two of the bedrooms on this floor have their fireplaces against

outside walk, and it must have required great ingenuity to lead their

tunnels to the central chimney stacks without risk of fire.

35These plans arc dated April to September. 1795, and it may be that

they anticipated the work, tor the floors were not put down until the

summer of 1797. The foreman’s lot; tor that period is full of entries

such as “Getting out timber for the carpenters’. “Moving flooring

boards for the carpenters’. ‘Carrying in flooring boards into the

building”. Laying the floors was no mean task as the boards were

do welled together. A ‘/i* square hole V^’decp was cut in the middle of

the side of the plank at 12″ intervals. Pegs of oak XA” square and 1″

long were then inserted into the holes in one plank, the holes in the

next plank were aligned with the pegs, whose protruding ends were

then inserted into the holes in the second plank, and the two were

gently tapped together. On the 28th of July, 1797, the smith was

‘making dowdling punch for the flooring”. There must be thousands

of such pegs throughout the house, and the number of man-hours

involved must have reached a formidable total.

One detailed carpentry account has survived, that of Patrick

Toole. It runs to seven pages, each with more than forty items; it is

not dated, and is set out, not in chronological order, but room by

room. It is a final account covering a long period of time from the

laying of the floors in 1797, until it was certified by Johnston for

1145.11.1016 on 5 September 1807. Mysteriously there is a later

correction by Johnston dated 18 February 1823; one hopes that Toole

did not have to wait till then for payment.

The bill nowhere suggests that Toole erected the main weight-

bearing timbers of the house, the girders and the joists, but he

certainly laid the floors in the upper storeys. It is largely an account

for work done, and not for materials. He appears to have supplied

the hall door. He also assisted the stuccodores.

The last paragraph in the bill records eight days’ work at 4s.4d. a

day ‘Making molds for running Cornice in bedchambers, large and

small moldings in Hall, floating rules, running rules & makeing a

gutter board over portico, putting hooks & staples on Garden Sash-

es, at the timber yard unpacking doors & other articles makeing pat-

terns for bars, hall windows and striking plates’. The phrase ‘at the

timber yard unpacking doors’ suggests that the mahogany doors that

are such a feature of the house were imported, perhaps from Dublin,

perhaps from further afield. Identical doors from the same workshop

were also used by Johnston in Galtrim House and Corbalton Hall.

An entry in the foreman’s log tells us that in June, 1798, a man with

two cars made two trips to Dublin to fetch “mahogan”.

For the 17th May. 1799 there is the short entry ‘John Kelly, the

Carpenter, quit work’.

As well as supplying common mortar for the general masonry and

brickwork, Joseph Townley also supplied ‘plaistering morter for the

Walls, Ceilings, Cornices of the different rooms as follows in the

36Figure U > a) Oiling plaster work south-east bed-room

b) Ceiling piaster work, principal dressing-roomFigure 17 Francis Johnston, undated: alternate schemes tor recess in the principal

dressing-room (M4f>)

38Mansheon House of Bleaney T. Balfour Esq. at Townley hall in the

County Louth: with the Hall and Grand Stair Case in do. 111. \i >

Run of Morter prepared for the different Cornices dubbed in said

rooms: Run of do Round Hall and large Circular treese and Cornice

under Doom that lights the stair case: furnishing Morter tor laying

nine harth stones, chimney peices and grates in said rooms £3.2.9.’.

The work was not measured by Thomas Winslone until 22 June.

1809. so Townley may have had to wait for his money.

The plaster was reinforced by having animal hair kneaded through

it. and on May 21. 1798 one man with two carts was sent to draw hair

tor the plasterers.

|oseph Townley provided the high-grade finishing plaster

necessary tor decorative work, and Patrick Toole made wooden

moulds, but we have no record of stuccodores” names. But in 1773

when the new drawing-room in the old house was being finished

“Ustice” (Eustace?) was the Plasterer and Stuccoman. In 1806 a

Robert Eustace is noted as stuccodore tor a house in Laurence Street

in Drogheda, and it was probably a Eustace who did the plaster-

work m the new Townley Hall. Eustace is still a prominent name

among the painters and decorators ot Drogheda.

Bui if we look for a Stuccodore with a capital S. we may be look-

ing in vain. For the days of the free-hand virtuoso were coining to an

end. Under Holland. Soane. and Johnston plasterwork was becom-

ing much more restrained, with increasing emphasis on surface and

detail; moulds were increasingly used. In some of the bedrooms the

running cornices are very elegant. In the south-east bedroom there is

a horizontal band. 8″ broad: in it undulating foliage with flowers and

buds is twisted round a central rod. Where ceiling and wall meet,

there arc pellets, moulding and “egg-and-dart” (fig. 16a). The large

south dressing-room is the only one with two windows, and Lady

Florence probably used it as a parlour as well as a dressing-room.

With its recessed inner end. which was a happy afterthought for

which Johnston submitted two designs (fig. 17). it is perhaps the

prettiest room in the house. The decorative running-band is on the

ceiling (fig. 16b); it is composed of two running narrow strips which

intertwine to form alternate large and small circles. In the larger

circles flower heads with straight or curved members alternate; m the

smaller ones marigolds alternate with roses. Where wall and ceiling

meet there is a band of erect leaves below and a twisted ribbon above.

Casting the ribbon in plaster must have been a difficult task; the

motif .iKo appears in wood in the drawing-room door-surrounds.

The cornices in Corbalton Hall, though a little later (1806-7). are

essentially similar in feeling and treatment.

Four lunettes in the central hall have groups of putti representing

the seasons: they stand quite apart from the rest of the plasterwork.and were probably fabricated elsewhere, possibly in Dublin.

George Booker, Builder and Painter, of 64 North King Street,

Dublin, did the glazing and painting. Unfortunately his detailed

accounts also cover work in the farmyard and at Mellifont, and it is

difficult to disentangle the house costs. One account, mainly tor

glazing, runs from March 1795 to July 1807. In October 1797, some

parts at least of the new house must have been ready for glazing, as

there is an entry *a pare of sashes that was put up in the new house by

the carpenters’, while the old house was still standing, as the

following entry reads ‘the two stair head windows in the old house’.

A separate account beginning 28 September 1796 deals primarily

with painting and papering, and unfortunately gives no indication of

the period it covers. Large quantities of paint were ground by farm

labourers in September. 1798. The work detailed was very

extensive, and probably includes the first decoration ot the house;

the total cost was i29O.11 .SVi. Nothing received less than two coats

of paint; in some places six coats were applied. The cornice round the

circle [the central hall) received up to six coats of oil paint. 103 Dz

(rolls no/ dozens) ot wallpaper and 67 Dz ot bordering were put up in

the bedroom floor (fig. 2()c). Large quantities ot green distemper

were also used.

A R C H I T E C T S FEE

Ten years after he became involved with Balfour, Johnston got the

commission to alter the Parliament Houses in College Green,

Dublin, to serve the purpose of the Bank of Ireland. Accepting the

post in 1803. he wrote: ‘Since Mr Cooley’s death (now twenty years)

I have pursued business on my own account and my uniform charge

for planning, directing the execution and settling the account of

buildings has been five per cent on the expenditure.’

It was presumably on this basis that he worked with Baltour. The

General Account Book shows the following payments:

E

21. 6.94 28.8.9

28. 6.94 28.8.9

4. 9.95 28.8.9

25. 3.95 28.8.9

20. 9.95 40.0.0

8. 6.95 10.0.0

23.12.95 100.4.9

4. 2.96 150.0.0

Further payments are recorded in the Bank Book:

E

8. 6.01 100. 0. 0

406. 6.02 54. 0. 0

3. 4.03 100. 0. 0

31. 5.03 38.18.10’/!(Ballusters)

2. 8.03 11. 7. 6

14. 3.04 9. 2. 0 (Doors)

Johnston’s estimate for the farmyard came in May 1793, and that for

the house in January 1794. The drawings for the house started to

come in June 1794. The first four payments are retainers, one guinea

a day for twenty-five days. The other irregular sums are presumbly

five per cent on bills certified. The entry for May 1803 can only refer

to the brass balusters in the central hall. As we have seen the erection

of these was completed in 1800, and it seems extraordinary that

Johnston should have had to wait three years for his fee.

F A M I L Y A F F A I R S

By the spring of 1797 the fitting-out of the house was well advanced.

Balfour renewed the quest of Lady Florence who was now

seventeen. She was very accomplished in pencil-drawing, and in the

previous autumn Balfour had taken lessons, as we can see from an

entry ‘to Mr O’Brien Drawing Master, £5.13.9.’ O’Brien (who

sometimes used the name Oben) was a distinguished painter in

water-colour, who was at work between 1780 and 1820. Lady

Florence made many pencil sketches of the country around Florence

Court, and Balfour may have wished to join her in this activity.

The engagement was announced in August 1797, and a letter of

congratulation to Florence throws light on Balfour’s finances.

‘Balfour had spent all the morning with your father, and behaved in

so noble so generous a manner as ought to be remembered. He

offered to settle fourteen hundred a year jointure on you. Your father

said No he should not, your fortune being only six thousand. He

answered he did not care if you had not sixpence, he would settle

twelve hundred. His estate is seven thousand eight hundred a year at

present including the mills (the big mill at Slane). With his domain of

five hundred acres he owes some money, and pays his mother one

thousand. But all together you will have above four to live on, and it

is a most rising property, and with it a sensible, prudent and good

man.’

Her mother-in-law to be, Mrs Letitia Balfour, wrote amid good

wishes, ‘We spent yesterday at Townley Hall, and never felt myself

so much interested in the new house before. I humbly trust that you

may enjoy as much true and solid happiness in it, as I did for a part of

my life in the old one.’

Balfour’s cash resources must have been very substantial at this

time, because as well as paying for his new house, his new farmyard

41and work at Mellifqnt, he added substantially to the Townley Hall

demesne. The five hundred acres he held were bounded to the east by

the Mullaroo stream which flowed in a deep glen southwards to the

Bovne. Another property, the Balnumber estate ot three hundred

and fifty acres, extended eastwards from the Mullaroo to another

deep defile, usually known as King William’s Glen. On 12 May

1796, he made a part payment of £4.679.3.9 to the Doyne family for

the estate. There was a house on the property, but this was

demolished by Balfour. His whole demesne then formed a Townley

Hall townland of some nine hundred acres.

The family also had much land elsewhere. In the middle of the

nineteenth century Thorn’s Directory began to publish the extent of

large holdings. Blayney’s son Blayney Townley Balfour IV, is

recorded as holding 6,213 acres; 3,137 in Louth, 1,453 in Meath, and

1,623 in Westmeath.

Blayney and Florence were married in October. 1779, and

presumably took up residence in the old house. Much still remained

to be done; in and around the new house itself, in the grounds,

building the stables, completing the new road along the Boyne,

making the new approach avenue, and erecting the entrance gates

and lodge. Mrs Balfour senior must have thought the house would

soon be finished, and written this to her friend, Mrs Thompson of

Kirby Hall. In February 1798, Mrs Thompson wrote in reply: ‘I am

glad to hear new Townley Hall is in any degree habitable. I dare say it

is a charming house.’

There was disruption in 1803, when it seemed that the

disturbances that accompanied the Robert Emmet rising might

spread into Louth. Mrs Balfour hurried back to find everything at

Townley Hall ‘very melancholy; the house deserted, and the poor

Protestants in the demesne and the servants in the House all in

Terror’, Though the days of pistol loops were over, the new house

had some defences. Behind the heavy hall door were a bar and a chain

that could be drawn across. AH the main windows had heavy

shutters across which an iron bar could be drawn. In the basement

the shutters were strengthened by heavy wooden bars. The bars,

which were wider than the windows, ran back into the wall on one

side and could be drawn across when needed. This arrangement can

be traced back to the seventeenth century. The basement door and

the yard gates were of very heavy wood.

C O M P L E T I N G THE H O U S E

The core of the house is the central circular hall (30’m diameter and

43′ high) with its floating stairs and balcony.-Johnston’s drawing

(fig. 18) is on paper watermarked 1798. In the hall the various

elements, structural and decorative, are combined into what

42Figure 1H Francis Johnston, water-mark 1798; lay-out of lower part of circular hall

•4344

Figure I’* Unsigned: overall ljy-0111 of library fcamnRgurc 2(1 Townley Hall

.1 ) Boudoir

b) Poor with circular motif

c) lkirdcrcd wallpaper [Country Ljfr, UMX)

45McParland calls ‘a single moment of spatial drama’. Hussey is more

rhapsodic: ‘I would dare to say there is nothing lovelier than this

rotunda in the Georgian architecture of the British Isles.”

Around the lower part of the hall there are eight rectangular

panels. On the drawing they have detailed measurements- 5’IOWx

2’7″ which resolve themselves into the proportion V5 to I. This

proportion was much favoured by 18th century architects, and

similar proportions may lie as yet unrevealed in other features of the

house. The drawing shows in alternate panels cloth swags ending in

ox heads seen in profile. The swags were not executed.

In the hall, where the emphasis is everywhere on the curve, it

seems curious that the doors themselves are not curved; Johnston

used curved doors elsewhere, with great effect.

The drawing of the library (fig. 19) is not in Johnston’s style, but

much of what it shows still exists. The mantelpiece is in heavy dark

marble, and not in white marble as shown in a Johnston drawing.

The scroll pendentives at the top of the sides of the double-doorcase

suggest a date in the nineteenth rather than late eighteenth century.

The library as we see it may be very different from what Johnston

intended.

The final drawings for the kitchen and the yard run from August

to September 1799, the meat-safe is September 1800, while the big

yard gates are on paper marked 1802.

Although the slates were taken off the old house in June 1799, a

letter from Mary to Florence dated Thursday, November 21st 1799

shows that the house even then was not fully complete. ‘My mother,

Balfour and myself came here together on Tuesday last, and found

sweet Townley Hall looking all smiling and cheerful as usual

Tell my dear little Blayney (b. 1799) that Townley Hall looks

beautiful, and the trees are greatly grown.’

She continues:

‘Balfour has done a good deal I think in laying down the grounds at

the approach side of the house [up the new avenue) and still there is a

great deal to do, the sort of work that the more you do, the less you

show. The Hall [the front hall) is greatly improved in its appearance-

the floor of it is compleated, and the walls are rough plaistered and it

looks full twice as large as before, and the ceiling which we thought

looked heavy looks much better since the room looks larger. The

niche opposite that for the stove is made in the circular hall, and is a

great improvement, and the parlor closet is quite large enough.’

The 1794 Townley Hall plans (fig. 12a) show the staircase in the

central hall running anti-clockwise, and only one alcove for a stove;

the house as executed (fig. 12b) has the stairs running clockwise, and

two alcoves – or niches – as the letter indicates. The ‘parlor closet’

might be the W.C. on the ground floor, or the dressing-room on the

46same floor beside the back stairs. In later years the dressing-room

was used as a small sitting-room or boudoir (fig. 20a). It is a

charming room with a groin-vaulted ceiling. This ceiling appears

again on a more elaborate scale in offices in the Bank ot Ireland.

The house must have been reasonably complete by the spring of

1779. There must have been lots of fires in the grates because the first

lot of Coal Ashes was spread on the fields on June 27. This may have

been an effort to have the back yard tidy before the inspection visit of

the bride’s father, the Earl of Enniskillen.’ which took place the

following day. The Earl must have slept in the new house, because

the demolition of the old house had started earlier in the month.

I think we may picture the house as complete by January 1, 18(X).

The bells to summon the servants were installed in the preceding

summer, and most of the plastering must have been finished before

that work could be done.

‘22.8.99 Ryan put up 3 Bells and 42 Cranks in the New House

his time here

injune 14

do July 11’/?

do August 4

Total 29 days

Cash reed. 5.2.4’/;

29.8.99 Ryan the Last time Hanged 2 bells

Putt in 25 cranks

of time 5’/2 days.’

The windows were cleaned for the first time in October, in

November ‘the room the plasterers were in’ was cleaned, and

rubbish was carried out of the house in the third week ot December.

The house was perhaps not fully complete for Christmas

festivities, but I am sure that every effort was made to celebrate the

first of the new century in the new Townley Hall.

Mary’s letter of November 21st continues:

‘There is a fine light in the Hall to-day, and it looks very sunny and

feels so for we have bright cold frosty weather to pink our noses.

You’ve got a nice little stove in the doom of the Melon pit, but not

quite finished yet—it will do tor grapes and vines and keep your plants

which indeed want a house, though they look wonderfully in the old

greenhouse which is very bad indeed. The Arbutus in the orchard is

grown very large and is very beautiful, and Bal tells me he has

bought some young ones. I walked to the Boyne yesterday |down

the new avenue]. The trees get on greatly, and I think they don’t look

so thick now. Bal has sold £80 worth this year, which I think must

have been of great use. Within doors all looks well—it wants but you

and all to be settled here to be in my eyes the sweetest of all spots. Bal

seems in excellent spirits—his home seems to cheer his heart.’

47He must also have breathed a sigh of relief, as five and a half years

had elapsed since he fired the first shot of blasting-powder.

Johnston’s rate of work was slow; Charleville Forest, near

Tullamore, took eight years to build.

Mary writes again, not from Townley Hall, perhaps in the spring

of 1800.

‘I have not yet thought of anything I like for the bannisters of your

great staircase – I thought once of a green basket or flower pots, one

on each step and along the passages, but I fear it might be too heavy

for the point of the steps, and may loosen it at the wall – what do you

think? I think that would be very pretty, but all manner of safety is

first to be considered, and be sure. I will be thinking, and may hit on

something. As to the colour of the hall I don’t know what to say. I

wish you could see a colour in London you liked and send a pattern

for it be matched. I hope early in May to be at Townley Hall, and on

the spot I can judge better I wish you would plan your kitchen

alteration and let it be executed under our eyes, for we mean to be at

T.H. for six weeks or so in the summer when Anne is at Dawson’s

Grove – how I wish that Bal would take the house here in September

and come over – oh how happy I should be.’

From the tone of the letters it is difficult not to sense that Lady

Florence had retired to England with her babies, and had said she was

not settling in the new house till it was completely “housewarmed”.

She had nine children, and probably some miscarriages also, spread

over a period of twenty years. Also the social circle to which the

Balfours belonged drifted constantly on from one house to another;

Townley Hall was not an established family base, but a port of call

for longer or shorter stays.

The plans for the stable offices run from 1799 to 1804, and the

work started on May 31, 1799. Here for once Balfour bit off more

than he could chew. Johnston’s rectangular lay-out (fig. 21a) has

coach-house, with grainstore and cupola over, on the north, stables

to east and west, and a screen wall with arched entrance on the south,

all much as at Rokeby Hall. A later scheme (fig. 21b) replaces the

screen wall by low railings with piers, for which Thomas Hammond

quoted £37.15.9 in 1823: the railings were not erected. Theeast stable

block was never built. There is quite a good architectural plan for the

block by Lady Florence – though it carries a pencilled note ‘This

should have been better if 1 had had better tools’, and also notes in ink

‘not built yet – 1837 FTB\

In January 1796, Johnston produced a plan for an enormous

‘Pine stove’, 100′ in length. This was a hothouse, partly heated

by decaying bark, partly by stoves; smaller glasshouses abutted

against its ends. This was presumably to be sited in the large walled

garden, but I do not know whether it was ever erected. There arc also

48Figure 21 a) Francis Johnston, undated; elevation ot stable block (M53)

b) Unsigned; proposed alterations to stable yard entrance (M58)plans for a peach-house, 50′ long, but these are not in Johnston’s

style.

O R G A N I S I N G T H E G R O U N D S

As Wren’s Map of County Louth (1766) shows, the road running

west from Drogheda on the high north bank of the river Boyne

dropped down the steep flank of King William’s Glen to river level at

the point where the stream in the glen joined the Boyne (the iron

bridge and the stump of the obelisk stand here today). It then

climbed the steep flank to the west, crossed the Mullaroo Glen on a

bridge, and turned north-west, passing quite close to the Townley

Hall site. When Blayney Townley Balfour I aggrandised his house in

the 1770s, he objected to the passing traffic, and began the building

of a new road which started at King William’s Glen and ran at a low

level beside the Boyne. Between the two glens a side road from the

upper road ran down the slope to the river bank, and Balfour’s new

road connected with it. This route then became the main road

between Drogheda and Slane. The old upper road was closed, so that

traffic no longer passed through the demesne. Some guineas were

distributed as compensation for disturbance.

The new road was completed by Blayney Townley Balfour III,

who also constructed a carriage drive down the Mullaroo Glen, with

entrance gates and lodge where it joined the new route. In April

1H02, Johnston produced a grandiose design, with high central gate-

way surmounted by a coat of arms (fig.22a). A much more modest

design (fig. 22b), with piers and railings only, carries a note in ink

‘Gate of T. Hall design and proportions by BB & FTB’. It was re-

drawn by Johnston as a working-plan in August 1810 and duly

erected, though the lions which sit on the central piers in the plans

never appeared. Richard Mallet, Smith, etc, (of 90 Marlborough

street, Dublin) quoted £237.17.8 for the iron works.

It must have been decided to have a temple-like gate-lodge, and

there are two possible sources for the design. Sketched on a single

sheet of paper, which was then folded and sent without comment as a

letter to Johnston, is a design for a shelter with an internal bench

(fig.23a). Pasted into a drawing-book which belonged either to

Anne Dawson or Florence Balfour (their styles of drawing were very

much of the period, and both had a taste for architectural design) are

drawings, both plan and elevation, of a small temple-like building

(fig. 23b), labelled Sir Harcourt Lees, with .Se.j written at one side.

The Reverend Sir Harcourt Lees lived by the sea at Blackrock.

County Dublin, where the ruined bath-house still stands, though the

property was very much interfered with when the Dublin/Kings-

town railway was constructed in 1834. The bath-house can be seen in

a contemporary engraving of the railway at Blackrock.

50Figure 22 a) Francis Johnston. April. 1N02; main entrance gates (M62)

h) Blayncy and Florence Balfbur. undated, main entrance gates (MM)

51Figure 23 a) Unsigned: unidentified shelter (AD IK44)

b) Unsigned: Sir Harcourt Lcc’s bath-house (family sketch-book)

c) Townley Hall: Boync gate-lodge (anon.)The lodge was built in 1819 (fig. 23c). Andrew Boyd laid out the

pediment and made moulds for the cornice of the lodge; he also

measured the stonecutter’s work. From Boyd’s bill we again see

Baltour’s tardiness in payments. Boyd charged £36 as one year’s

interest on £600 which was outstanding. After having served as a

gate-lodge for more than one hundred and fifty years, the building

was transformed into a shelter with internal benches about 1960.

Boyd’s bill also makes it clear that the laundry, which adjoined the

stable-yard, was built in 1818, as he did a lot of work there. There is a

plan of the laundry by Anne Dawson.

The foreman’s log book for 1798 and 1799 shows the general

improvement of the environs of the new house in progress. Balfour

created a great open space of about fifty acres – the Lawn – to the

south and east of the house. He levelled the field banks, cleared away

cottages that had been along the old road, and planted park trees.

By June 1813 Mrs Letitia Balfour was able to write to her

daughter-in-law:

‘I found the place beautiful thorns, lilacs, libernums etc in full flower

and all the foliage almost at the full; everything so nice and

flourishing that I longed for you every step I took this morning; not

to mention the perfume of the air and the chorus of birds (and

then on a more practical note) you have never said whether you lie in

at Townley Hall or not.’

In 1827, Mr James Fraser, a London nurseryman, made a tour of

Irish estates and reported his findings in The Gardener’s Magazine;

Fraser, of course, had a personal interest in the professional

management of gardens and woodlands. His report runs:

‘Townley-Hall, the property of B. Balfour, Esq. within three miles

of the town of Drogheda, is one of the most interesting places we

met with on our northern tour. It is situated near the Boyne, directly

over the obelisk commemorative of the battle named after that river.

Mr Balfour is a gentleman of great practical experience in rural

matters, and personally directs improvements on his extensive

estates. He is the most spirited planter in this part of the country,

excepting Lord Oriel. A fine wooded glen runs through the

demesne, on the eastern bank of which the principal approach to the

house has been judiciously carried. The extensive young plantations

are suffering much by want of thinning and pruning; a circumstance

to be regretted in a place of this magnitude, and where business is

carried on with such spirit. We will venture to suggest to Mr B. the

propriety of consulting a professional man in these matters, or of

employing an experienced forester to manage his woods, so far as

regards the matters referred to. Townley-Hall bids fair to be one of

the most magnificent demesnes in the Kingdom; and every lover of

rural ornament must regret any circumstances, however contingent,

53Figure 24 Central hall with busts. Thorwaldscn, led. Canova, right (anon.)that would tend to mar the prospects of one of the most spirited

planters we now can boast of. The gardens are well kept m every

department: the drest-grounds are upon a large scale, and contain an

extensive collection of shrubs. In short, the whole place forms a

striking contrast to those around.’

Balfour must have been a proud and happy man when he read

these lines. His palatial mansion, if not exactly a cosy family home,

was one of the most magnificent in Ireland.

The cosiness that was lacking in Townley Hall was supplied by a

cottage ornee. Fairy Hill in Rostrevor, County Down, only about

thirty miles distant. It was rented from the Ross of Bladensburg

family, and served for many years as a retreat for the ladies of the

family.

What did Balfour see as he walked around his splendid house? He

had no shortage of old furniture or ot pictures. Eighteen Balfour

family portraits had come to old Townley Hall from Castle Balfour

in 1741. and an inventory of the old house in 1773 lists about thirty

portraits, and many pictures – ‘Our Saviour on ye Mt wth his

disceples, St Bartholmew flaying alive, a cattle peice, peasants

dancing, a flower and fruit peice’, many “landskips” only referred to

by their frames, and – in lighter mood – “three game peices and four

Hogarth prints”. He had new portraits of his own circle. His mother

had been painted by both Gainsborough and Lawrence.

Some furniture seems to have come from cabinet-makers who

also supplied Castlecoole, as a suite of Nelson style pieces, ranging

from simple chairs to large curved settees in the front hall at Townley

Hall, compares in detail with some small settees in the library at

Castiecoole. In 1806 Balfour paid Gillow £39.16.0 for furniture. His

grandfather’s Kircheimer harpsichord was replaced by a Broadwood

grand piano-forte. The Balfours were very musical, and had a large

collection of music, both manuscript and printed.

As fitting embellishment for the house Balfour collected neo-

classical works of art, probably on a further visit to Italy, early in the

nineteenth century.

The central hall (fig. 24) is adorned by plaster-casts of two self-

busts, Canova and Thorwaldsen, which cannot be older than 1812

and 1810 respectively. There is an allegorical portrait of Annonia

(Harmony), probably painted by Tomaso Minardi early in the

nineteenth century. Rather older are a wash drawing of the Temple

of Vesta at Tivoli by del Drago (otherwise known only from another

work at Castlecoole), and a wash drawing of the Campagna near

Naples by Philipp Hackert.

We can perhaps recreate one room, the dining-room, in some

detail. In the centre was the table, 13′ x 6′, of San Domingo

mahogany, and round it a set of new Regency chairs. Beside the door

55through which the food entered was the side-board, 8′ 6″ long and 3′

deep, against the west wall. The north wall had three windows, and

the east wall two. and the single fireplace in the centre of the south

wall must have found it hard to keep the room warm in winter.

There was a door at each side of the fire-place; one opened into the

front hall, and the other into the butler’s plate cupboard.

Mary Balfour in a letter to Lady Florence suggests how the

pictures will be arranged:

‘I think dear Arthur’s picture [Lady Florence’s brother, the Hon.

Arthur Cole, by Martin Archer Shee, 1801] looks extremely well

over the chimney, but we propose he shall move out of that and

make room for my Lady. Bal intends you shall sit next summer and

we beg it may be a full length (she was painted half-length, possibly

by Hoppner) which will just do over the chimney, and he will look as

well over a door, and Lord E [her father. Lord Enniskillen, by

Thomas Robinson] & Lowry [Sir Lowry Cole, another brother,

later one of Wellington’s generals, by Pellegrini, 1800] over the other

two. You may think where Bal [an unfinished half-length portrait by

Lawrence) can fit for I can’t find his place, as he chooses Kg William

[a Wissing version] to be over the sideboard, and I think he ought to

be full-length to’Ynatch you.’

We have seen that Balfour, though a rich man, was careful with his

money, noting every detail of income and expenditure. In building

his house, where he considered embellishment was important, as in

the circular hall, he did not hesitate to spend money. Elsewhere,

where lavishness was not necessary, he exercised restraint.

A R C H I T E C T A N D P A T R O N

I think we can see the evolution of Townley Hall developing from a

successful cooperation between able architect and informed patron.

When Balfour and Johnston linked up in Drogheda in the early

1790s, Johnston had had a good training and a good deal of

experience and responsibility. After he had blocked out the main

design, he was quite happy to vary it – within reason – at the

suggestion of his patron. In Slane Castle Johnston’s work is closely

interlocked with that of Wyatt, but on the neo-classical road

Johnston’s Townley Hall has travelled much farther than Wvatt’s

Castlccoole. Townley Hall’s importance rests on the balance of its

proportions, the purity of its sparse decoration, the quality of the

materials employed, and the skills of the craftsmen who handled

them.

After Townley Hall Johnston went on to many other works in

various styles. By 1823 he was at the peak of his distinguished career,

56Townley Hall; aenal view. ca. 1955 The chimney-stacks and the dormer

windows of the Jitic floor can be seen

57able to be proud of the many buildings he had erected in many parts

of Ireland. In 1823 he moved on to his final stage, founding the Royal

Hibernian Academy, providing it with a building for use as a

National School of Art, and assembling his personal collection of art

treasures

I am quite happy to fall in with Christopher Hussey’s summing-

up:

‘The common factors in these disparate works are Johnston’s grasp

of the aesthetic essentials as well as the grammar of each style, and of

their applicability to Irish conditions. We get the impression of a

mind not only of wide learning, but sane as well as sensitive: no less

alive to the practical factors of building in Ireland than to the

architectural possibilities of each undertaking.”

We may perhaps take leave of Townley Hall in 1823, the year < n

which Johnston wrote his belated endorsement across the carpenter’s

bill. The association between Balfour and Johnston had lasted for

thirty-five years, for they must have met before Johnston produced

his first design for a house in 1790. The relationship was a cordial

one, and as well as Townley Hall, Johnston built Galtrim and

enlarged Lough Gilly for Thomas and Anne Dawson.

Balfour was fortunately wealthy as well as informed; Portland

Stone could be used in the back stairs as well as the front. He had

travelled widely; he had stayed in many fine houses; he collected

architectural drawings; he made drawings himself. His sister Anne

was not only an eager colleague, but also competent in designing and

drafting. His bride. Lady Florence Cole, made many accomplished

pencil-sketches before she was seventeen; she could also turn out a

good architectural plan. The trio will have had many discussions and

have suggested many changes as the work proceeded. From all this

Balfour ultimately emerged with the house he wanted, a palazzo, the

splendid Townley Hall, (fig. 23).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have described this account of Townley Hall, its owner and its

architect as a personal one, because I have no expertise in architecture

or architectural history. Though I lived in the house for fifteen years,

every expert who visited the house brought some new detail to my

attention. I have had opportunity to study almost one hundred

drawings relating to the house, which were generously given to me

by the former owner of the house, Mr David Crichton. In the

National Library, where I received much help from Mr. Brian

McKenna and his colleagues, I saw many further drawings in the

Murray Collection. There is a very large collection of Townley Hall

Papers in the National Library, and guided by Manuscript Sources

58for the History of Irish Civilisation, I looked at those that appeared to

be relevant, and in particular –

in the 9.000 sequence – 349, 545, 553-4. 556, 593, 595, 597-8

in the 10,000 sequence – 249, 275-6, 279. 362, 370, 376-7

in the 11,000 sequence – 888, 901-5, 923

1 have also seen drawings and photographs in the Irish Architectural

Archive, under the guidance of Mr. William Garner.

I received a great deal of help from Mr. Hugh Brady, Mrs. Maura

Corcoran, Dr Maurice Craig, Mr. John Flaherty, Dr Eddie

McParland, Professor Alastair Rowan and Mr. Robin Walker. Dr

David Walker guided me to Cairness. I had discussions with Eileen,

Countess of Mount Charles, about Galtrim House, with the Earl of

Belmore about Castlecoole, and with Mr and Mrs von Schmieder

about Corbalton Hall. A late draft of the paper benefited greatly

from its scrutiny by the Knight of Glin. To all I express my thanks.

Nearly all the photographs come from Country Life; for Townley

Hall, 23 and 30 July 1948; for Cairness, 28 January 1971. 14a comes

from the National Trust Guide to Castlecoole, 1952. Permission to

reproduce is gratefully acknowledged. The Townley Hall

Collection of Architectural Drawings has been given by me to the

Irish Architectural Archive, 63 Merrion Square, Dublin 2. I have

deposited there a provisional catalogue in which the numbering

corresponds with a serial number prefixed by the letter M which I

have written in pencil on the top right-hand corner of each drawing.

The numbers of the drawings illustrated here, both in the Townley

Hall Collection and in the National Library, are given in the

appropriate entry in the list of illustrations of this paper.S O U R C E S C O N S U L T E D

BRADY, H.

BETJEMAN.J.

CRAIG. M.

1952

Francis Johnston. Irish Architect, 1760-1829

Unpublished thesis. University College, London

1946

Francis Johnston, Irish Architect

The Pavilion (I.T. Publications Ltd)

1977

Classic Irish Houses of the .Middle Size

Architectural Press

CURRAN, C P.

1967

Dublin Decorative Plastertvork

Alec Tiranti

DALE. A.

1956

James ll’yatt

Basil Blackwell

HENCHY, P.

1949/50

Francis Johnston. Architect, 1760-1829

Dublin Historical Record, II, pp 1-16

HUSSEY. C.

1948

Townley Hall, Co. Louth. Ireland

Country Life, pp 178-81 (23 July) &c pp 228-31 (30 July)

McPARLAND. E.

1969

Francis Johnston, Architect. 1760-1829

Quart. Bull. Irish Georgian Society. 12 pp 61-139

1981

Castlecoole

The National TrustMALCOMSON, A.P.W.

1978

John Foster; the Politics of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy

Oxford University Press

MALINS, E. & THE KNIGHT OF GLIN

1976

Lost Demesnes Irish Landscape Gardening, 1660-1845

Barrie & Jenkins

MITCHELL, F.

1979

Townley Hall – Its site and its history

Mellifont Parish Magazine, pp 35-7

ROBINSON, J.M.

1979

The Wyatts: An Architectural Dynasty

Oxford University Press

WALKER, D.

1971

Cairness, Aberdeenshire

Country Life, pp 184-7 (28 Jan.) & pp 248-51 (4 Feb.)

‘Bulletin XII 1969 Issue 3’

Irish Georgian Society bulletin XII — 1969

About Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies

FRANCIS JOHNSTON, ARCHITECT, 1760-1829

by Edward McParland, Christ’s College, Cambridge.

Introduction

On the 24th March 1845, and on the seventeen succeeding days, the art collec-

tion built up by Francis Johnston in the last years of his life was sold by auction

in Dublin. Of the collection, the auctioneers proudly claimed that “with the

exception of the great sale at Strawberry Hill, there never was a catalogue pub-

lished, or a collection offered for sale, containing the same number of rare and

precious articles.”2 The collection, according to the catalogue, “was commenced

as a pleasure (and) became latterly the business of his life.” In the last ten years

of his life Johnston had turned from the practice of architecture to the formation

of this collection which was to be dispersed only sixteen years after his death.

It is suggested later that this premature retirement from an unusually success-

ful career may be a sign of revolt against the type of commission he received in

his position as Architect of the Board of Works, and which was basically un-

suited to the sensitivity of his nature and style. From these projects he turned to

the collection which, like the Royal Hibernian Academy which he founded at

the same time, would express a permanence in his life’s work. Unfortunately,

the fate of the “Johnstonian Collection” is characteristic of how fortune treated

much of Johnston’s search for permanence. Even in his lifetime he expressed

fears (subsequently proved groundless) for the imminent decay of Rokeby Hall,

the country house on which he first worked. In 1846 his coat of arms, which he

had hidden under a piece of wood attached to the Richmond Gate,3 was dis-

covered and erased. Since his death, many of his buildings have disappeared or

have been damaged—his finest castle Charleville Forest is exposed to vandals.

his triumph of planning at the Richmond Penitentiary has been largely demol-

ished, and St. Andrew’s, one of his finest churches in Dublin, was destroyed by

fire in the middle of the last century. Even today, his fine Cornmarket in

Drogheda is used as a Corporation dump, and is due to be demolished.

From what is left of Johnston’s buildings, from his rare letters, from his many

drawings now in the National Library in Dublin and from the occasional critical

attention paid to him in the past, it has been possible to build up some picture

of his personality and of his approach to architecture. Firm biographical details,

however, are scarce. He was born in 1760 in Armagh of a prosperous family,

the first member of which to settle in Ireland was a William Johnston who came

from Scotland to repair buildings damaged in the rebellion of 1641. Francis’

father, also William, was a builder occasionally acting as an architect and of his

1) This article was originally submitted to the University of Cambridge as part of the examina-

tion for Part II of the Architecture and Fine Arts Tripos. 1 would like to thank the many

people who helped me with its preparation, especially the staff of the National Library in

Dublin; also Mr. George Paterson and Mr. Roger Weatherup of the County Museum,

Armagh. 1 am particularly grateful to Dr. Maurice Craig for his many valuable suggestions.

2) A catalogue of the sale is in the possession of Mr. Richard Graves Johnston, of Armagh,

a great-great-grandson of Francis Johnston’s brother, Andrew.

3) The Richmond Gate stood on the South Quays of the LilTey as the gate to the military road.

In 1846 the gate was moved to the main entrance of the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham.

621. Townley Hall, entrance elevation.

four sons, three were “brought up as architects, but with such a knowledge of

carpentry as made them sound practical architects.”4

When he was eighteen, Richard Robinson. Archbishop of Armagh, sent him to

work with his architect, Thomas Cootey, in Dublin. Johnston stayed in Dublin

until Cooley’s death in 1784 when he succeeded his master as Primate Robinson’s

architect. A letter written in 1820 by Johnston to J. N. Brewer gives an outline

of his career from 1784 onwards and a list of his most important works.5 By the

time of writing this letter he had taken his nephew, William Murray, into part-

nership in his office. Freed from a profession which had brought him material

wealth, but probably a decreasing spiritual satisfaction, he devoted himself to

his paintings, his sea shells and the other valuables in his collection. He also

devoted himself to the Academy and in 1824, the year after its foundation, he

designed its premises which he built at his own expense. In 1829 he died and was

buried in the churchyard of St. George’s Church in Dublin.

What follows is an account of his work, domestic, public and ecclesiastical.

It traces his career from the early work in Armagh under the shadow of Cooley;

to Townley Hall where he first gave allegiance to Wyatt; to his late maturity in

the years immediately following 1800, when he remained faithful to Wyatt but

achieved an assured and very personal style, particularly in interior decoration.

It traces his success, culminating in his appointment in 1805 as Architect of the

Board of Works and Civil Buildings, and his career thereafter, dominated—

despite the Chapel Royal—by the penitentiaries and asylums of the period

1805-1815. The aim of the essay is not purely documentary: it is also partly

intended to be restorative for the reputation of a dedicated and important

Irish architect.

4) 5) The Citizen, Vol. IV, July-Dec. 1841, notice on Johnston in the series ‘Native Artists.’

This letter was published in the Quarterly Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, Jan.-Mar.

1963, pp I ff.

632. Townley Hall, kitchen wing.

1. DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE

It is appropriate that a consideration of Francis Johnston’s domestic architec-

ture should begin with an account of Townley Hall in Co. Louth, designed for

Blaney Townley Balfour in 1794. Although Johnston was thirty-four years of

age when he made the designs, the house is an early work. If we accept the

evidence that he alone was not entirely responsible for Rokeby Hall, then

Townley Hall is his first major domestic commission. The interest of Townley

lies not only in the intrinsic quality of Johnston’s work, but also in the way in

which he announced there themes of bleak austerity, primitive orders, attention

to detail and an emerging style of interior decoration which were to become

dominant in much of his later work.

The elevations in the 17946 drawings show flat, two storey, seven bay facades,

crowned with a cornice (Plate 1). There are no mouldings around the windows,

6) Photographs of these drawings are in the I.A.R.A. Coll., PF22. In PF20 there are three

plans, signed by Johnston and dated April 1794, for Townley Hall, and one early elevation

(unexecuted).

The following abbreviations are repeatedly used:

I.A.R.A. Coll: Irish Architectural Records Association collection of architectural

drawings in the National Library, Dublin.

Murr. Coll: Murray Collection of drawings, mostly by Johnston, and part of the

I.A.R.A. Coll.

PF: portfolio number.

Nat. Libr.: National Library of Ireland, Dublin.

I.A.D. Exhibition: Irish Architectural Drawings Exhibition 1965, Dublin, Belfast,

London (R.I.B.A.).

643. Townley Hall, ground floor plan by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

65no decorative relief anywhere in fact, except a rather mean frame (not executed)

with small engaged Ionic columns around the main door. On the west facade

the cornice is interrupted and the attic windows become visible, while the base-

ment windows too are revealed and look out onto a sunken kitchen yard. The

one-storey kitchen wing, now derelict, extends from the north end of the west

facade into this yard (Plate 2).

The plan (Plate 3) is arranged around a central top-lit domed rotunda which

rises through two storeys from the ground floor and which contains the main

stairs. Rectangular rooms are distributed around this central space. In the attic

storey, rooms are lit by dormer windows behind the cornice, and are entered

from a corridor lit by windows overlooking the dome. Describing the house in

his letter to Brewer in 1820, Johnston referred with characteristic modesty to the

remarkable rotunda—it is “open to and lighted from the top (and) has a good

effect” (Plate 4).

The source for the “singular and impressive austerity”7 of the exterior is to be

found in James Wyatt. In an early drawing for the entrance elevation for

Townley there are specific allusions to Wyatt in the wide tripartite windows of

the end bays. The development towards regularity in the later drawings, the

increased austerity of the facades and the use of Greek Doric columns8 suggest

further that Johnston was following a lead given by Wyatt in his Irish buildings.

That Wyatt’s work should have been influential for an Irish architect of

ability, who was still unknown, and who had received an important country

house commission, was to be expected. Wyatt was the great man who had been

called in from abroad for the prestigious work at Slane and Castle Coole. There

were, however, other reasons why Johnston should have looked to Wyatt, as

he was to do later in his Castle style phase. Johnston had been a protege of

Primate Robinson who had employed Wyatt for the building of Canterbury

Quad in Christ Church, Oxford. Also, since Richard Johnston, a brother of

Francis, had produced designs for Castle Coole in 1789, and with Thomas

Cooley had actually built Newtownmountkennedy House” on Wyatt’s plans,

Francis Johnston must have been intimately familiar with, and much influenced

by, the Attic simplicity of Castle Coole and Newtownmountkennedy House.

The precise source for the plan of Townley Hall, dominated by the central

rotunda, is more difficult to pin down. An obvious parallel can be drawn be-

tween this plan and that of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda without its porticoes, where

the central space has a diameter of thirty Vicentine feet. The diameter of the

Townley stair-well is also thirty feet. Gibbs in his Book of Architecture engraved

the plan of a country house10 which develops this theme by placing a double

branched curving staircase in a centrally placed top-lit space; also, as is clear

7) Christopher Hussey, Country Life, 23rd and 30th July, 1948.

8) The portico as built is Greek Doric. It is not clear from the Dublin drawings at what date

the Ionic doorcase was replaced by the Greek Doric portico, but Johnston’s interest in

the primitive orders in the mid 1790’s suggests a date not much later than 1794.

y> John Cornforth on Newtownmountkennedy House, Country Life, October 28th and

November 11th, 1965.

10) J. Gibbs, A Book of Architecture, 1728, Plate 54.

664. Townley Hall, staircase.in St. George’s Church in Dublin, and in the General Post Office, Johnston knew

Gibbs’ book well, and used it as a source of inspiration. With these suggested

points of departure must be mentioned the Irish habit of having spacious,

centrally placed and top-lit bedroom halls.11 Such a bedroom-hall, rising through

two storeys, is found at Castle Coole, where the actual plan owes more to

Richard Johnston than does the elevation. Circular bedroom halls are also found

in both upper floors of Rokeby Hall.

From some such amalgam of influence, prototype and local practice Johnston

evolved this Townley rotunda, this isolated grand gesture in a plan which is

otherwise as rectangular and austere as the elevations.12 It was typical of Johnston

to concentrate in the staircase the single moment of spatial drama in a house.

The staircase seems to have appealed to his interest in support and construc-

tion, as well as interesting him for its dramatic potential as the focal point of a

plan—these two aspects are exploited at Glenmore and Corbalton Hall as well

as at Townley (Plate 21).

In Townley Hall, the severe restraint of the exterior has been brought inside.

The single suggestion of interior columnar interest—a screen of two columns at

each end of the Library—was abandoned. There is little variation in room shape,

no spatial variety as one moves from one room to the next. Where the walls are

modelled, the emphasis lies on gentle, low relief and shallow recesses, rather than

on a rich use of deep niches.13 Apart from the drama of the rotunda there is a

restrained and antirhetorical approach to the planning. Just a year before the

first designs were made for Townley Hall, in 1793, Richard Morrison had pub-

lished his Useful and Ornamental Designs in Architecture. Here Morrison, who

later became a serious contender for some of the more important commissions

eventually given to Johnston,14 had given plans of houses of various pretensions

and scale. The grander houses had internal screens of columns, lobbies ending

in semi-circular apses, circular rooms straight from Gandon’s work on the

Parliament House, with deep niches scooped out from the intervals between

recessed columns. These designs represent the consciousness, on the part of a

contemporary Irish architect, of the Adamesque tradition so firmly rejected by

Johnston.

In some of the details of the decoration, too, there is an economy consistent

with the austerity of elevation and plan. The entrance hall (Plate 5), with its

heavy Greek fret, its Greek Doric chimney piece and the square coffering of the

11) Maurice Craig, Country Life, May 28th 1964 on Bellamont Forest, Co. Cavan.

12) Of this staircase, Hussey {op. cit.) wrote “I would dare to say there is nothing lovelier than

this rotunda in the Georgian architecture of the British Isles.” In comparing this rotunda

with Wyatt’s circular staircase in Devonshire House of 1811, it is tempting to suggest that

the Wyatt-Johnston relationship may have been, to some degree, mutually beneficial.

13) The very shallow recesses in the hall are also a feature of the hall in Garvey House. There

is a plan of Garvey House by Johnston in the I.A.R.A. Coll. PF2.

14) The Knight of Glin has drawn my attention to an interesting comment made in 1822 by

Morrison in a letter to Sir Charles Coote of Ballyfin: ” I beg your permission to observe

that my knowledge of this country and of the buildings executed in it, enables me to know

that with the exception of Mr. Johnston, my son and myself, there is not any architect in it,

in whose hands you could place your business with a prospect of such a result as you

would desire.”

685. Townley Hall, entrance hall.

696. Ballymakenny Church, design for west front by Thomas Cooley (Nat. Librj.

707. Kells Church, design for west front by Thomas Cooley (Nat. Libr.).

718. Rokeby Hall, entrance elevation.

ceiling, sets a serious tone which is echoed in the Library.15 The decoration of

the rotunda is a little richer, but the traditions of Adam, and of the currently

fashionable Michael Stapleton in Dublin, were rejected. The brittle elegance with

which Johnston had toyed in the Primate’s Chapel in Armagh has vanished,

never again to reappear in his work. The different decorative strains of this

rotunda are used together in an experimental but unsynthesized way. The ox-

head frieze, the criss-cross vaulting, the naturalism of the oak-leaf and acorn

moulding, the gauche draperies and lion heads, the lunettes with their high

relief,16 the wiry simplicity of the running vine band threaded through a simple

fret with acorns underneath—these are all exercises in different themes, com-

bined, but not fused into a very satisfactory whole.17 In this rotunda Johnston

15) The drawing-room ceiling in Townley Hall is remarkably similar to the dining room

ceiling in Castle Coole where economy had dictated a more restrained style than in the

Saloon. (Compare illustrations in Country Life, July 30 1948, Plate 4; and December 26

1936, Plate 8.)

16) Professor Mitchell, the present owner of the house, has pointed out to me that these

lunettes have been enlarged and were probably not made for their present position. They

are not unique in Johnston’s work. They resemble the plaques which decorate the exterior

of his own house in Eccles Street.

17) Many of these motifs appear together in the vault of William Chambers” Strand vestibule

of Somerset House.

729. Lucan House, entrance elevation.

was experimenting with these themes. Some, like the naturalistic oak motifs,

were to become almost inevitable in his interiors; others, like the ox-head frieze,

were never used again.

More important than the experiment with individual motifs was the way in

which he tried to solve the problem of applying ornament to large areas with a

controlled economy, which would give to the most opulent scheme the unosten-

tatious effect consistent with his own taste and personality. Rokeby Hall is

decorated very sparingly; so too is the Armagh Observatory. The only important

interior decorative scheme on which Johnston had worked before Townley Hall

was therefore that of the Primate’s Chapel in Armagh. In the Chapel and in

Townley Hall we see the experiments that within ten years of Townley Hall were

to develop into the maturity and assurance of St. George’s and the Bank (see

Plates 39, 40).

Townley Hall is a key work in Johnston’s career, and it may be used as an

illustration of many characteristics of his style, as seen not only in his classical

country houses but in some of his ecclesiastical and public buildings as well. The

austerity of the Townley elevations was first enunciated at Rokeby Hall. In 1820

in his letter to Brewer, Johnston says that from 1785 to 1794 he was employed

by Primate Robinson in “erecting” a country house and two churches, one at

7310. Rokeby Hall, ground floor plan (Nat. Libr.).

Ballymakenny and the other at Clonmore. It is clear from the context that the

house is Rokeby Hall, and this letter has encouraged the belief that Johnston

alone was responsible for the Hall and the two churches.18

The church at Clonmore is ruined, and can yield no evidence of authorship.

The church at Ballymakenny is more interesting. In the Murray Collection in

the National Library in Dublin, there are four drawings—a plan, a section and

two elevations—for Ballymakenny church as it was built,1″ but without date or

signature (Plate 6). The plan is headed “Plan of Ballymakenny Church.” They

18) John Betjeman, however, in The Pavilion (London, 1946, ed. M. Evans) described Bally-

makenny church as by Johnston but “probably from Coolcy’s designs.”

19) These drawings arc in the I.A.R.A. Coll.. PF 2.

7410.—” GROUND-FLOOR PLAN FOR MR. VESEY’S HOUSE

AT LUCAN,” BY MICHAEL STAPLETON

The following notes in Stapledon’s writing have been trans-

cribed from a fainter duplicate :

The dotted lines in plan show the manner of the division of Bed-

chamber story.

The wall that forms the Oval room in parlour story is carried up no

higher than the first story, which leaves an open lobby from great stairs to

the wall at ir the same width as stairs—the light at the end is not very

strong as it is too great a distance from the Venetian window of stairs—a

sky-light would be a vast improvement.

I I. Lucan House, ground floor plan. Country Life.

are catalogued as drawings by Johnston.2″ In the same collection, however

(portfolio 17), there are photographs of drawings for a church at Kells, signed

by Cooley and dated 1778 (Plate 7). Judging from these photographs the drawing

style of the two sets of drawings is the same. Further, there is an almost exact

correspondence between the designs of the two steeples. It seems clear, therefore,

that the drawings for Ballymakenny are by Cooley. Johnston’s reference in 1820

to his share in the work for this church does less than justice to his master,

according to whose designs he completed Ballymakenny Church.

One consequence of the above is that one must question Johnston’s share in

the design of Rokeby Hall, which has always been attributed to him. Since it

would be his first country house, elements in Rokeby which are untypical in his

later work, for instance the engaged order on the facade, must be treated with

caution. The existence in the National Library in Dublin, however, of plans

20) Betjeman, op. cil., wrote of this drawing (Plate 6) “The drawing and design are almost

indistinguishable from the work of Thomas Cooley.”

7512. Farnham House (Lawr. Coll.).

previously unrecognized as plans for Rokeby and which are not by Johnston,21

indicate that architects other than Johnston were involved in the design.

The most interesting of these plans (none of which is signed, or dated and

none of which is in Johnston’s drawing style) is a set of plans unquestionably by

the same hand as a ground plan of Lucan House, Co. Dublin, built between

1773 and 1781 for Agmondisham Vesey.22 This plan is of unknown authorship,

but it has been suggested23 that itwas drawn by Michael Stapleton. The common

authorship of these plans suggests a comparison of the elevations of the two

houses.

The front elevations (Plates 8,9) share such features as a 2-3-2 window rhythm,

unmoulded openings in the first floor with a common sill threaded behind the

order, and an Ionic order, supporting a pediment, rising in the slightly projecting

centre block over the ground floor.

There are important differences, but they are all consistent differences between

the richly modelled and the flat. The high central block of Lucan, with its tall

engaged columns, was lowered at Rokeby; the columns became pilasters,

ground floor rustication was lowered to the basement, and the deep recesses of

the central ground floor were flattened out. Similar differences exist between the

plans (Plates 10, 11)—the niches of the hall at Lucan, otherwise similar to the

hall at Rokeby, were filled in; the oval projection on the rear elevation of Lucan

was also flattened out.

21) These drawings are in the I.A.R.A. Coll., PF 20.

22) Christopher Hussey, Country Life, 31st January 1947; John Harris, Quarterly Bulletin of

the Irish Georgian Society, July-September 1965.

23) Catalogue of the l.A.D. Exhibition, 1965, No. 44.

7613. Cornmarket, Drogheda.

Now if an architect other than Johnston was responsible for the original

designs of Rokeby Hall, that architect would be Thomas Cooley, the architect

of Primate Robinson, for whom the house was built. This raises a slight prob-

lem, since among the multiplicity of architects whose names are connected with

Lucan House—Chambers, Stapleton, Stevens, Wyatt and Agmondisham Vesey

himself—the name of Cooley does not appear. At this point it is necessary to

mention Newtownmountkennedy House.24 Briefly, its plan is closely connected

with that of Lucan House; it was designed by James Wyatt in 1772; and it was

built by Cooley and Richard Johnston, a brother of Francis, around 1782.

Therefore it may be suggested that Rokeby Hall was far from being an original

idea of Johnston’s, and that original plans were made by Cooley (and possibly

by others).25 The plans of the ground floor and first floor are adaptations from

Wyatt’s plans for Newtownmountkennedy and from the related plan of Lucan

House. Johnston did “erect” Rokeby, as he said, but few details of the plan

can be his. The scheme for the entrance elevation, too, .he probably inherited,

but treated it with a feeling which was reaching towards the simplification

of Townley Hall. The entrance elevation of Rokeby Hall is, in fact, a neat

24) John Cornforth, Country Life, October 28th and November 11th, 1965.

25) A collection of drawings by Cooley which may throw light on this question has just

recently come to light. The drawings are in Caledon Castle, Co. Tyrone.

7714. Headfort House, suggested alterations for entrance elevation by Francis Johnston

(Nat. Libr.).

illustration of what an architect, tied to the basic scheme of Lucan House

and developing towards Townley Hall, might be expected to produce.26

The severity of exterior elevation which, inspired by Wyatt, began to emerge

at Rokeby and which received its definitive statement at Townley, is character-

istic of Johnston’s classical domestic work. The additions to Farnham House27

are varied in the ground floor (Plate 12) with semi-circular headed windows like

in the kitchen wing at Townley. The severity is relieved sometimes by tripartite

windows, as at Corbalton Hall,28 and sometimes by a doorway with a small

columnar frame as at Clown.2″ On the whole, however, these smaller classical

houses present a rather dull picture, and some, without the happy proportions

of Rokeby and Townley, anticipate Johnston’s later “penitentiary” style. Often

close at hand in his work is the “hardness” described by Craig/10 The dividing

line between Attic simplicity and this hardness was not always under control,

even in Charleville Forest, the most picturesque composition of this least pictur-

esque of architects. There, on the facades, between the corner towers, the relent-

less symmetry of Johnston establishes its claim over the picturesque demands of

his patron. The regular rectangular windows glare out from a facade which

‘shares the bleakness of Johnston’s classical houses, of his penitentiaries and even

of his General Post Office (Plate 24).

In the work of such a man we would expect to find, around the turn of the

century, a ready adoption of the appropriately austere forms of the Greek

Revival. And so it was, but to a limited degree. It is difficult to date accurately

26) Dr. Alastair Rowan has suggested to me that a consideration of the authorship of Rokeby

Hall might include a consideration of Ihe house and gate lodge of Annesbrooke, Duleek,

where several Johnston-like details can be seen.

27) Co. Cavan. Drawings for these additions, which were largely demolished in 1963, are in

the I.A.R.A. Coll., PF 3, signed and dated 1802.

28) Co. Meath. Additions to an older house, built for Elias Corbally. Drawings in I.A.R.A.

Coll., PF 2, signed and dated 1801-1807.

29) Co. Meath. Additions to an older house, built for Waller Dowdall. Drawings in I.A.R.A.

Coll., PF 2, signed and dated 1801.

30) Maurice Craig, Dublin 1660-1860, p. 281.

78i. Kildare, suggested east elevation by Francis Johnston

the Greek Doric portico of Townley Hall—it appears in none of the dated

elevations31 in Dublin. It is unlikely to be much later than 1794, however, be-

cause during the years that Johnston was working at Townley, that is in the later

1790’s, he began to develop an interest in primitive orders and their suitability

to his evolving style of domestic architecture. In the hall in Slane Castle,:!2 for

instance, the columns are baseless, but have Tuscan capitals with an enriched

necking band. The real interest in the Slane hall is in the chimney pieces, where

baseless Greek Doric columns support an entablature where the frieze zone is

omitted, but with the guttae of the missing triglyphs remaining in the architrave.33

The Townley Hall work includes, besides the portico, Greek Doric columns in

the hall chimney piece, and columns of a Primitivist order on the kitchen wing

(Plate 2). After Townley Hall comes the set of porticoes designed for Farnham

House, Ballycurry House,34 and the Adjutant General’s Office.30 These porticoes

are all one-storey high with Doric columns, sometimes fluted, sometimes not. At

Corbalton Hall the portico is also one-storey high, but unusual in Johnston’s

domestic work36 in being Ionic. The columns are baseless. So we see, that despite

his interest in the Greek Revival, as witnessed in the precocious use of a Greek

31) Only one drawing in the I.A.R.A. Coll. shows Townley Hall with this Greek Doric

portico. It is an undated and unsigned drawing in PF 2.

32) Johnston’s work on Slane Castle was contemporary with his work on Townley Hall.

33) This order corresponds, detail for detail, with the order of the loggia surrounding three

sides of the Corn market in Drogheda (Plate 13) (behind the Market House, now the Court

House), where, however, the columns are unfluted. This market complex was built by

Johnston, and the conjectural date suggested by Betjeman (in The Pavilion), is 1788. The

building certainly looks later, and because of the similarity with the Slane chimneypieces,

a more likely date would be in the mid ’90’s. On this order. Dr. Maurice Craig has sug-

gested to me that it resembles a bit “the primitive style of Gandon as seen at Carriglass

and in some Gandon drawings in the Lowther Castle collection now in Carlisle.”

34) In Co. Wicklow. Rebuilding of an old house, for Charles Tottenham. Drawings in I.A.R.A.

Coll., Nat. Libr., PF 5, signed and dated 1805-1806.

35) In the grounds of the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. Though a military structure, it is built

entirely in the style of a modest private house. It dates from c. 1805.

36) We can exclude the two-storey high Ionic portico added by Johnston to the Vice Regal

Lodge in Dublin, a building by its nature more public than private.

7915a. Killeen Castle, unexecuted plan by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.)

Doric portico at Townley Hall around 1794, and his later preoccupation with

the forms of the Greek Doric capital in his public work (see below), his adoption

of the forms of the Revival was quiet, unostentatious, and never monumental.

The Revival, of which he was an early exponent, became fully established during

his life, but the more established it became, the less Johnston used it in a con-

ventional way, and the more it became for him a style of allusion.

In another sphere of domestic building this quiet and scholarly interest in the

primitive orders can be seen at work. In 1799, when he first drew up plans for

alterations to the house of St. Catherine’s in Leixlip, Co. Kildare,37 he also made

a drawing38 for a dairy, with columns in a rustic order, covered in bark. The

following directions accompany the drawing:

“

. . . the plinths on which they (i.e. the columns) stand to be of stone, and

the Caps of Wood. The Entablature to be finished (in appearance) from the

hatchet, and coloured to match the bark of the pillars.”

Later, in 1802, he made a “sketch for dividing and finishing the Wood Cottage

at St. Catherine’s.”311 Here his primitivismwent a stage further—the roof was to

37) Described in the catalogue of the Murray Collection as “now demolished (built) for Mr.

Latouche.” The house still stands. As was pointed out by Dr. Alistair Rowan in his thesis

on the castle style (in the University Library, Cambridge) Johnston’s gothicmng altera-

tions were not built.

38) I.A.R.A. Coll., PF 2, St. Catherine’s folder No. 5.

39) I.A.R.A. Coll., PF 2, St. Catherine’s folder, No. 10.

8016. Killeen Castle, design for entrance elevation by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

be supported by tree trunks without plinths or capitals, across which lay a simple

wooden board acting as architrave. Beyond this, primitivism could not go.40

As was appropriate for a disciple of Wyatt, Francis Johnston built in the

Castle Style. His activity in this style was quite intense in the first five years of

the nineteenth century, and falls quite naturally into three main groups. Firstly

there are commissions, where his brief was to gothicize and castellate an existing

classical house without making major structural additions. Secondly there were

commissions for considerable alterations and additions to classical houses—and

sometimes to genuine mediaeval structures. Finally there was the single com-

mission for Charleville Forest, a new scheme to be built from the ground up.

Johnston received only one such commission41 but its influence on later castle

style building in Ireland was greater than that of any other of his works in

this style.

In the first category there are only two projects—St. Catherine’s and Headfort

House at Kells, Co. Meath. Neither project was executed. At Headfort (Plate 14),

40) At least one later use of the rustic order by Johnston is known. In the I.A.D. exhibition

1965, the catalogue illustrated a plan and elevation for a seat at the Spa Well, Phoenix

Park—a tetrastyle temple in a rustic order. The drawing, in the possession of Mrs.

Desmond Forde, is signed and dated 1810.

41) It is not quite correct, as has been done elsewhere, to regard Glenmore, Co. Wicklow, as a

fresh commission. Drawings in the l.A.R.A. Coll., PF 13 make specific reference to the

original fabric which was to be included in the new, much larger, scheme.

8118. Markrcc Castle, view of south-east elevation (Lawr. Coll.).

for which drawings dated 1802 are in the National Library,42 Johnston provided

a rigidly symmetrical solution. Irish battlements enliven the roofline; chimney

stacks have been turned into turrets; and over the centre of the house rises an

Inverary motif; towers have been added to the corners of the house. Gothic

formulae—labels, shallow pointed arches—have been applied to the windows,

but Johnston’s Headfort stubbornly remains a large classical country house that

has been prettified in a castle style.

At St. Catherine’s the following year Johnston suggested a genuinely prettier

solution.43 Again, gothic formulae were applied, but even less substantial addi-

tions were proposed than in Headfort. An elegant gateway joining the house to

a little chapel to the north gives the east front of the design (Plate 15) as drawn,

an attractive asymmetry. However, in the other elevations—the main entrance

elevation and the long southern elevation overlooking the Liffey—Johnston

made insistent demands on regularity and symmetry. On the southern facade

these are disturbed by the projection from the side elevation of the oval bay.44

The regularity of the window levels is disturbed by the lancets in the “towers,”

but again Johnston let St. Catherine’s remain clearly a classical house, altered

in a very routine and insubstantial way.

42) l.A.R.A. Coll., PF 3.

43) As well as drawings in l.A.R.A. Coll., PF 2. there are two elevations in l.A.R.A. Coll.,

PF 16.

44) This is a recurring feature of Johnston’s designs that the symmetry of complete facades

is perfect, if we ignore what may project slightly from other facades. It appears at Killeen,

Glenmore and Markree as well as at St. Catherine’s. It is a relaxed symmetry, as distinct

from a more abstract type which might apply to the plan considered as a whole.

8319. Slane Castle, proposed elevation by James Gandon (Nat. Libr.).

The major works in the second category are on Killeen Castle,45 Markree,46

and Glenmore.47 Johnston’s early, unexecuted designs for Killeen are interest-

ing. There is a freedom and an informality of plan (Plate 15a) which appears

elsewhere in his work; the attempt not simply to preserve the symmetry of the

exterior but to introduce a symmetry which the original mediaeval castle never

possessed is also typical. But the deep niches of the Library come as a surprise,

and the informality of plan is brought to far greater degrees than anywhere

else. Johnston liked a freedom in plan and he liked the large sweep of ample

curves to play a part in the plan—one thinks of the half elliptical bedrooms of

Corbalton Hall and of Markree; but the play with irregular room shapes, with

circles, with ten sided figures and even with piano-shaped rooms is parallelled

nowhere else in his work. These designs were not executed.

The design as built exploits the projections of the original facade, but only

slightly (Plate 16). The chances these projections provided for varying the skyline

45) Co. Meath; for Lord Fingall; Drawings in l.A.R.A. Coll., PF 3, signed and dated 1802

and alternative designs in 1803-4. Later enlarged by Shiel.

46) Or Mercury Castle, Co. Sligo, for Joshua Edward Cooper; drawings in l.A.R.A. Coll.,

PF 3, signed and dated 1802-4.

47) Co. Wicklow; for Francis Synge; drawings in l.A.R.A. Coll., PF 13 and PF 14. Now

in ruins.

8420. Glenmore Castle, Co. Wicklow, design for south-east elevation by Francis Johnston

(Nat. Libr.).

in a picturesque way were ignored. Johnston started out here in Killeen with

an original mediaeval castle and finished with a structure that almost looks as

if it could be a cleverly gothicized classical house. The Romance of the castle

was killed. The logical, serious, painstaking Johnston had no control over the

powerful association of ideas, so important in the appreciation of the castle style.

At Markree, Johnston built large additions in the castle style to an originally

classical house (Plate 17). The long south-east front (Plate 18) repeats the basic

scheme of Slane Castle, but the Slane as designed by James Gandon (Plate 19)

rather than by Wyatt. The long facade is organised just as at Slane, but it has

been flattened out, with the central semicircular tower replaced by a more gentle

and a shallower curve. The pointed arches of the ground floor of the central

tower18 echo Slane, and the circular openings below echo an alternative design

by Gandon for Slane.40 The skyline, though enlivened with Irish battlements,

has been made more even than in Slane and this, together with the flattening

of the facade and the discontinuity of floor levels and windows, makes of this

main elevation of Markree a much less powerfully massed whole than Gandon’s

scheme. Markree, of course, lacks the dramatic situation of Slane overlooking

a sharp fall of ground, sweeping down to the Boyne; but essentially it was

Johnston’s treatment of the theme,50 with his reluctance to use pronounced

vertical or horizontal projections, which denied Markree the drama of Gandon’s

design.

48) Johnston’s original design was for three pointed arches in the ground floor of the central

“tower”; only the middle opening was built arched.

49) Illustrated in catalogue of I.A.D. exhibition 1965, No. 68; drawing in I.A.R.A. Coll.,

PF 2. These openings were built square, at Markree.

50) The relationships between Markree and Slane Castle, and between RokebyHall and Lucan

House, have some features in common. In both cases Johnston’s houses are more static,

less richly modelled than the earlier buildings.

8522. Charleville Castle, Co. Offaly. Country Life,

The relentless symmetry of the separate elevations of Glenmore (Plates 20,

21), the shallow projections—this time in the form of canted bays as in the

parlour at Killeen, the narrow corner towers as at Headfort, the central accent

enlivened with Irish battlements as at Markree, and the classical proportions

of solid to vofd in the flat intermediate wings, all these can be seen as predictable

in a Johnston castle. The refusal at Markree to fuse the potentially powerful

forms into a forcefully massed composition became, at Glenmore, a failure to

synthesise the masses into satisfying elevations: the south-east front of Glenmore

can be seen as an inverted Markree-Slane theme, with a polygonal projection

of three bays in the centre of the facade separated by flat intermediate wings of

three bays from circular corner towers. The corner towers and central motif rise

up above the level of the neighbouring bays but this variation of level is com-

promised by the intervening chimney stacks. The interiors at Glenmore were

classical, and the broad sweep of the curved staircases of Townley Hall and

Corbalton Hall was repeated. Otherwise the plan is uneventful and informal and,

like the elevations, a little dull. The bleakness which Johnston chose to impart

to the elevations he imparted even to the surrounding landscape in this drawing.

He was not fair to the country-side around the Devil’s Glen: looking at the

house, one feels that he may not have been entirely fair to Francis Synge either.

At first sight Charleville Forest, built for the Earl of Charleville from 1801

onwards,51 is spectacularly different from Johnston’s other castle style houses.

The entrance elevation (Plates 22, 23) shows a very marked asymmetry. The

roofline develops the Inverary tower motif suggested for Headfort House, while

the round north-east corner tower, a little self-consciously, makes a determined

bid for irregularity. The main block of the house is nearly square in plan, with

a tower at each corner—square towers at the corners of the rear elevation, and

on the entrance front a broad circular tower on the left corner, and on the right

51) Drawings for Charleville Forest are in the l.A.R.A. Coll.. PF 2, signed and dated 1801.

See Mark Girouard, Country Life, 27 September 1962.

a 723. Charleville Castle, view of entrance elevation. Country Life.

an octagonal one. From this octagonal tower runs out a lower range of buildings

—chapel, kitchens, offices—on a diagonal axis. “Ore-like in its sprawl, the char-

acter of the house was forbidding, even cruel; and in Irish architecture this was

entirely new.”62

A letter from Lady Louisa Conolly to Lady Charleville dated November 8,

1800,53 mentions the very considerable part which the patron played in the

design of this castle. Her statement, however, that he had “planned it all him-

self” is unlikely to refer to the castle as built. Johnston’s drawings date from the

following year, and throughout the building can be seen Johnston’s attempts to

assert himself over Charleville’s demands which were basically foreign to his

nature as an architect. The buildings beyond the chapel on the diagonal wing—

the offices—are quite symmetrical. The elevations of the main block (apart from

the entrance front) are, apart from the corner towers, as symmetrical, regular

52) Rowan, op.cit.

53) This letter is quoted in Girouard, op.cit. “1 am very glad to hear that you have begun

your Castle . . . and Lord Tullamoore I am sure will enjoy it much having planned it all

himself.

K

8824. Charleville Castle, design of east elevation by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr).

and austere as any elevation of Townley (Plate 24). Even with the corner towers,

the rear elevation is entirely symmetrical.

Inside, the details of plumbing, joinery and decoration are entirely Johns-

tonian. Water which is collected from the roof is piped to lavatories; there are

open fan shapes in the window reveals,54 gently convex chimney breasts,°5 crisply

carved oak leaves and acorns on the chimneypieces, plaster vaulting in the pas-

sages leading from the centrally placed bedroom hall which rises through the

first and second storeys and is top-lit by a dome in the Inverary tower. The

fan-vaulting in the great Gallery anticipates the vaulting of the aisles of the

Chapel Royal. The design for the chimneypiece in this Gallery is taken from a

door in Magdalen College.50 Further, the plaster moulding on the ribs of the

small first floor room in the large circular tower reappears in the vaults of the

Board Room and Governor’s Room in the Bank of Ireland.

That many of the decorative details in Charleville should reappear in the

Bank, in the Chapel Royal or in St. George’s is not surprising since these works

54) Dr. Maurice Craig has pointed out that these characteristic fan shapes occur in Kilcarty

by Thomas Ivory.

55) As in Armagh Observatory.

56) This was pointed cut by Girouard, op.cit.

8925. Primate’s Chapel, Armagh, design for interior of west end, by Thomas Cooley (Nat.

Libr,).

90for interior of west end, by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

91Primate”s Chapel, view of west end.

are roughly contemporary with Charleville.67 But the fact that some such details

can be shared by buildings as stylistically varied as these is more noteworthy.

This property of versatility was pointed out by Dr. Maurice Craig.68 The crisp

naturalism of the oak leaf mouldings in St. George’s or Townley Hall is entirely

in keeping with the moods of the Dublin church and of the Louth mansion. Yet

it attains a new appropriateness in Charleville Forest, not only to the Gothic

character of the house, but to the site of the ancient oak forests of Offaly on

which the house stands.

Part of the significance of Johnston’s castle style houses lay in the fact that

all of them, except Glenmore, had fully Gothic interiors. As with the Greek

Revival, it was not Johnston who initiated the fashion in Ireland, but it was he

who helped to popularize the style. Alistair Rowan has shown the importance

of Wyatt’s Library in Slane Castle for this development of the idea of a Gothic

domestic interior.50 fn Slane we can see, not only the origin of the idea, but,

I believe, the specific source for many of Johnston’s decorative motifs. The

abundance of plaster heads in Slane immediately recalls the Chapel Royal and

Killeen Castle. Further, the low dado, the oak leaf and acorn mouldings, and

57) Charleville, begun in 1801, was not finished until 1812.

58) M. Craig, op.cit., p. 282.

59) Rowan, op.cit., p. 238.

9228. Primate’s Chapel, view of east end of ceiling.

the kind of bubbling-seaweed carving all lead back to indicate another aspect

of the profound influence of James Wyatt on Johnston, and through him on

Irish architecture.

Johnston’s castle style phase was short.60 Ironically, the most successful and

influential building of this period—Charleville—was the one where his person-

ality, though evident, was obscured by the demands of the owner, demands

which Johnston could not have been happy to satisfy. The romance of the castle

style was foreign to his cautious nature, and it was the last experiment he made

in domestic architecture. His abandonment of the style when work on Pakenham

Hall finished in 1810 reflects not so much a rejection of a style which he realized

as unsuitable, but rather a slackening in the domestic side of his practice. For

in 1805 he had been appointed Architect of the Board of Works and Civil

Buildings, and the bulk of his work was to be centred in Dublin from that date,

until his architectural activity began to decline with the rise of the General Post

Office, sometime before 1820.

60) In 1806 he made alterations to Pakenham Hall (now known as Tullynally House), Co.

Westmeath, for the Earl of Longford. Drawings in I.A.R.A. Coll., PF 6. Later additions

are by James Shiel and Richard Morrison. In 1814 he suggested additions and castellations

to Kilruddery House, Co. Wicklow, for the Earl of Meath. Drawings in I.A.R.A. Coll.,

PF 6. These suggestions were not adopted, and are of interest only as extreme instances of

how far Johnston sometimes went in the search for symmetry. In PF 19 there are plans by

Johnston and Murray for unimportant extensions to Howth Castle, in 1825.

9329. Primate’s Chapel, pilaster capital.

2. CHURCH ARCHITECTURE

When Francis Johnston succeeded Cooley in 1784 as architect to Primate

Robinson, his first task was to complete the buildings which Cooley had begun

and left unfinished at his death. He erected the tower and spire over the crossing

of the Cathedral in Armagh and an obelisk on Knox’s Hill in the grounds of the

Primate’s Palace. He also decorated the interior of the Primate’s Chapel, a little

temple by Cooley with a tetrastyle Ionic portico standing beside the Palace.

Some very fine stone details on the exterior of this Chapel, reflected in the very

high quality of the stone details in Cooley’s Royal Exchange in Dublin, suggest

that one of Johnston’s important debts to Cooley was a careful and meticulous

attention to stonework.

As can be seen from Cooley’s designs for the interior (Plate 25), Johnston was

tactful in his approach and mindful of Cooley’s original intentions. There is a

drawing1 in the National Library, signed by Johnston, and dated 1785 (Plate 26),

which shows the interior of the chapel largely as it exists today (Plate 27). It is

a superbly executed drawing,2 and its phenomenal minuteness of detail shows

1) This drawing is in the I.A.R.A. Coll., PF 2, Armagh Palace folder, No. 4.

2) It must, however, be admitted that the light falls from the left. The only windows in the

drawing are on the right. This photograph conveys none of the remarkably detailed quality

of the drawing.

9430. St. Peter’s Church, Drogheda, view of steeple (Lawr. Coll.)

9531. Chapel Royal, Dublin Castle, view of north elevation (Lawr. Coll.).

the exacting standards of the architect who demanded, and obtained, similar

standards from his craftsmen. Structural changes from Cooley’s design are few.

The windows have been changed from the left wall to the right, the gallery has

been given a curved rear wall and the entablature is carried in Johnston’s design

continuously over the gallery. Panelling has been added to the walls which thus

become clearly divided into zones—the zone of pews, and raised above this, the

zone articulated with pilasters.3 The gallery balusters have become attenuated

and graceful. Draperies, always a favourite with Johnston, decorate the gallery.

The ceiling has become coffered, with rosettes in the coffers; and a delicate frieze

which almost looks as if it might have been designed by Michael Stapleton,

surrounds the whole room (Plate 28).

The chapel interiors show two decorative strains. On the one hand is the effete

and rather standard frieze, and the equally routine formalism of the capitals

(Plate 29). On the other hand is the rectangular sobriety of the ceiling (Plate 28),

with the petals of its rosettes curling up at the ends according to vegetable laws

rather than the laws of plaster. For the first strain, Johnston had no time. He

was more interested in experiment than in formula. He rarely used enriched

friezes and in the General Post Office, when he decorated the frieze over the

portico, he turned the traditional anthemion frieze into a knotted, rather wild

and muscular affair. His real interest lay in the development of the second strain,

and in the use of a crisp naturalism, sparingly used, and circumscribed by hard

3) This division of the walls into zones, with the pilasters rising from above the seated com-

munity, can be seen as the Bank Cash Office scheme in embryo.

9632. Chapel Royal, view of east end.

9733. St. Andrew’s Church, Dublin, plan by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

geometrical shapes. In the rotunda of Townley, there is the formula of the

ox-head frieze; but there are the oak leaf garlands bent into semi-ellipses, and

there is the vine running through a primitive Greek fret. In many ways, the

Townley rotunda is more experimental than the Primate’s Chapel, but both look

forward to the full resolution of his style in the early years of the nineteenth

century.

Johnston’s supervision of work originally designed by Cooley at Ballyma-

kenny Church has already been mentioned, and a close dependence on Cooley’s

style is evident later in Johnston’s work on the steeples at Slane in 1797; St.

Andrew’s, Dublin and St. Catherine’s, Tullamore. Johnston’s activity in de-

signing steeples for churches4 is probably an expression of his own interest in

bell-ringing. (To house his own collection of bells, he built a tower, now demol-

ished, behind his house in Dublin.) In the Public Library at Armagh there is an

interesting collection of drawings by Cooley, dated 1773 and 1774, for churches.

No specific parishes or locations for these churches are mentioned, and it appears

4) John Betjeman, in The Pavilion, lists as a “doubtful attribution” to Johnston the spire of

Lismore Cathedral. The Dean of Lismore, Very Rev. Gilbert Mayes, M.A., has pointed

out to me, however, that the spire was the work of the brothers Paine of Cork, in 1827/8.

The Paines were pupils of Nash, and enjoyed a considerable practice in the south of

Ireland.

9834. St. George’s Church, Dublin, view from Temple Street.

9935. St. George’s Church, view from Eccles Street.

that the collection of designs was made as a sample book, with no particular

commissions in mind. The plans, like those of the churches of Ballymakenny

and Clonmore, are plain, rectangular, with towers on the west ends. The eleva-

tions of these towers, some with spires, others without, consist largely of assem-

blies of standard elements in different combinations—pointed windows, labels,

rectangular openings with almond-shaped windows, circular elements, coats of

arms, corner buttresses ending in pinnacles, battlements. This dull and un-

imaginative method of combining standard motifs in such a way appears often

in Johnston’s steeples, even in the very important steeple of St. Andrew’s in

Dublin. From one who had looked at the Gothic of the English cathedrals, and

from one capable of the refined elegance of the St. George’s steeple, more might

have been expected than a routine reliance on Cooley’s rather impoverished style.

The steeple of St. Peter’s church in Drogheda (Plate 30), of about 1790 is

slightly exceptional, in being more experimental than his other designs. Here he

10036. St. George’s Church, ground plan by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

10137. St. George’s Church, view under gallery.

put a spire on a tower whose details are classical rather than Gothic. The small

deep semicircular openings repeat a theme of one of the lower storeys of the

tower of the Rotunda Lying-in Hospital in Dublin. The circular element with

side brackets supporting a pediment comes from Gibbs° as, perhaps, do the per-

forations in the spire. The base of the spire itself recalls the base of the spire of

the church at Hillsborough, Co. Down,6 a favourite haunt of Johnston because

of his interest in bell-ringing.

Many of Johnston’s churches have fared badly down through the years.

Clonmore is ruined. The church at Arklow, and the Roman Catholic churches

at Kells and at Drogheda have been demolished. His designs for the church at

Castlepollard, Co. Westmeath, were altered, and a cheaper church built. His

work in St. Andrew’s in Dublin, burnt in the middle of the nineteenth century,

is the most tragic loss; but his two other masterpieces, the Chapel Royal in

Dublin Castle and St. George’s, not only stand but are, happily, immaculately

preserved.

5) Gibbs, A Book of Architecture, e.g. Plate 23.

6) Alistair Rowan, op.cit., p. 93, suggests that this “very fine example of Georgian Gothic

. . . unique in Ireland” may be by Sanderson Miller.

10238. St. George’s Church, view of west end.

The foundation stone of the Chapel Royal7 was laid by the Lord Lieutenant

on 15 February, 1807, and the chapel was opened on Christmas Day, 1814.8 The

exterior of the building (Plate 31) is restrained and not unlike part of the side

elevation of Magdalen College viewed from the Quad, if the projecting lower

storey—in fact part of the Quad cloister—is projected back onto the flat side

facade of the chapel. The stone used is a dark limestone and the dimensions of

the plan were confined to those of the original chapel. The plan is basically

rectangular—inside, the chancel projects beyond the ends of the aisles, between

offices and sacristies which on the outside can be seen, in fact, to protrude beyond

the east end of the chancel. The long side elevations are each divided into six

bays by buttresses ending in pinnacles. Each bay is of two storeys over a base-

ment, with tall windows above lighting the galleries.9 On the pinnacles and under

the labels of the windows are heads sculpted in stone, not out of keeping with

the Gothic character of the whole. There is a suggestion, however, of something

7) The chapel was re-consecrated in 1943 as a Catholic Church dedicated to the Most Holy

Trinity.

8) Johnston’s own description of the Chapel Royal was printed by Patrick Henchy in the

Dublin Historical Record, December 1949-February 1950.

9) The tracery in these windows strongly resembles that of the Magdelen Chapel windows.

103St, George’s Church, detail of ceiling.

unexpected about to happen in the large full-blooded heads of St. Peter over the

north door, of Brian Boru10 over the east door, and in the three-quarter length

figures of Faith, Hope and Charity over the east window.11 The whole effect of

the grey severity of the exterior, however, does not prepare one for the exuber-

ance inside. The entrance to the church is from a low, narrow vestibule on the

west, above which is an upper vestibule opening into the gallery. No grander

approach from the west could easily have been planned, since the space was

limited by the proximity of the Record Tower.12

The interior measures 73 feet by 35 feet, and is divided, despite its narrow-

ness, into a nave and side aisles (Plate 32). The aisles contain a gallery which

continues around the west end where it holds an organ. The ceiling of the nave

is groin vaulted, and over the gallery the ceilings of the aisles have a rich fan

10) Brian Boru was the first High King of Ireland. He died in 1014.

11) All the exterior figure carving, and the plaster figures inside, are by Edward Smyth and

his son John. The stucco ceilings inside are by George, the son of Michael Stapleton, who

decorated Belvedere House. Michael Stapleton died in 1801 and should not be confused—

as sometimes happens—with his son whose style in stucco, seen in the Chapel Royal

(and probably in the somewhat similar Killeen Castle) is totally different.

12) Towards the end of his work on the chapel, Johnston recased the upper storeys of the

Record Tower, and added battlements. For engravings of this work, and his lay-out of the

interiors see the Reports from the Commissioners . . . respecting the Public Records of

Ireland 1810-1815.

10440. St. George’s Church, detail of ceiling.

vaulting with pendants, as if the ceiling of the Charleville Gallery had been con-

tracted and squeezed into the confined narrowness of the galleries here. The

ceilings under the galleries are laid out in tracery, whose lines agree with the

lines of the fan vaulting of the upper ceilings, but projected onto a flat ground.

The pendants are more compressed, and their terminations are decorated with

cherubs’ heads.

The general effect of this interior is one of pomp and richness, a richness of

both colour and form. The pale plasterwork enriched with gold, and the darkness

of the richly carved oak meet in a light softened by coloured glass. Plaster mould-

ings rise in a frothy spray in ogee shapes over the pointed arches of the nave.

Everywhere are plaster corbel heads of kings, evangelists and saints. The glass

panels of the side windows are filled with the arms of Viceroys. The wooden

gallery fronts, too, carry arms, as does the panelling of the chancel; and below

these arms, running all around the galleries, is a carved wooden band of “bub-

bling seaweed” pattern which appears in the gallery of Charleville. The consist-

ency of the decorative scheme is carefully planned—the heraldry in glass and

wood, the heads in carved wood and plaster, and the foliage in glass and plaster

and wood—these themes culminated in the pulpit, originally placed high in the

centre of the east end, raising the preacher to the level of the gallery where the

10541. Daly’s Club House and Parliament House, from the engraving by R. Havell, after

T. S. Roberts, c. 1815 (National Gallery of Ireland).

pew of the archbishop faced that of the Lord Lieutenant.13 The pulpit was central

to the decorative programme of the whole chapel. On it, the carver, Richard

Stewart, combined episcopal arms with naturalistically carved foliage, and set it

on a shaft terminating in a cluster of four heads,14 a clear allusion to the clustered

cherubs’ heads on the pendants below the galleries. But here, the heads are those

of the four evangelists and thus the pulpit—placed in the chancel over which

rises a vault whose ribs spring at each corner from the head of an evangelist—

acted as a focal point of the chapel, and with a thoughtful allusiveness perfected

the consistency of the whole scheme. It is a pity to see here, and in St. George’s,

such thoughtfulness frustrated.

This consistency must be seen underlying the apparently undisciplined frivolity

of the Chapel Royal, when we attempt to place this interior in Johnston’s other-

wise more controlled decorative work. It is also important to acknowledge that,

unlikely though it may seem, Johnston in the Chapel Royal was trying to be

authentically Gothic. Firstly, it appears from the diary he kept of his English

tour in 1796,15 that the qualities he admired most in Gothic architecture were its

lightness and elegance rather than its structural expressiveness. At Gloucester

Cathedral, he admired

“the lightness and true proportion of the Buttresses, the neatness of the belt

courses and elegance of the Gothic screen and pinnacles of the Tower. . . .

“

13) The pulpit has been moved to St. Werburgh’s Church, Dublin.

14) The pulpit is illustrated in H. Wheeler and M. Craig, The Dublin Citv Churches of the

Church of Ireland, Dublin 1948, Plate XVII.

15) The dfery is now in the Armagh County Museum.

106Salisbury was looked at in the same way—he admired the “height, lightness and

elegance of execution” of the Cathedral Tower. The Cathedral itself “is a beauti-

ful light gothick structure with a just uniformity of style in every part.” These

are the only characteristics of Gothic which he mentions.16 He could hardly have

been unaware of the structural expressiveness of Gothic, but his non-Gothic

work shows a repeated avoidance of becoming explicit about actual means of

support for such things as stairs and galleries. He was clearly therefore unlikely

to feel at home with anything but the decorative details of Gothic.

It seems then that he sought to achieve a Gothic effect by the multiplication

of such details as he considered “correct”. His friend Brewer,17 spoke of the basic

seriousness of Johnston’s efforts in the Chapel Royal in describing it as “the

most elaborate effort made in recent years to revive the antient ecclesiastical

style of building.” He went on to say that

“

. . . The plans of the groined ceiling, and of various parts in the detail . . .

are derived from the most highly ornamented divisions of York Cathedral.”

This seriousness of Johnston’s intentions is further confirmed by early com-

mentators on the Gothic Revival. Thomas Bell18 rather surprisingly wrote in 1828

“The revival of this taste in Ireland has been accomplished, or at least the

correct ideas of it which now prevail in this country, have been principally

introduced . . . (by) the architect of the Castle chapel.”19

Whatever we may think of the “correctness” of Johnston’s Chapel Royal, it

seems that he wished it to be correct and authentic. It fails to be this, but re-

mains, with its plaster ceilings, its Virtues reclining in billowing drapery over the

east window, and its display of heraldry, the most intimate of his interiors, and

precious evidence of the kind of surroundings in which the Viceregal Court felt

itself closest to God.

Somewhat similar to the Chapel Royal but much less elaborate was Johnston’s

chapel of the Foundling Hospital20 described in 181821 as “lately finished.” The

same source mentions both its “uncommon elegance” and bad acoustics.22 Other

Gothic churches such as the church at Kells and St. Peter’s Roman Catholic

church in Drogheda, both demolished, were of minor importance. St. Catherine’s

in Tullamore, completed in 1815, was slightly more ambitious. The florid Chapel

Royal style was not appropriate for this* country church, so superbly sited on a

hill overlooking the town. The interior, with its Latin cross plan, its nave with

clerestory, and side aisles is plain and a little dull. For the tower Johnston fell

back on the standard Cooley-inspired solution, and one is inclined to think that,

16) In London on 10th April, he wrote that he went to Westminster Abbey “which was

open” (!) “took a glance at the monuments and thence to Westminster bridge which

I looked at for some time.”

17) J. N. Brewer, Beauties of Ireland 1825-6, vol. 1, p. 63.

18) Thomas Bell, Gothic Architecture in Ireland, 1828, p. 249.

19) Perhaps not unnaturally, Johnston wrote to Thomas Mulvany on 25th February, 1828 that

he was assured of the fidelity and accuracy of Bell’s work. The letter is quoted by Bell,

p. 256.

20) The Foundling Hospital is now St. Kevin’s Hospital: the chapel has been demolished.

21) Warburton, Whitelaw and Walsh, History of Dublin, 1818, p. 585.

22) Direct influence of Johnston’s Chapel Royal was seen in William Farrell’s closely similar

Chapel of the Female Orphan House, built in 1818-19. This has been recently demolished.

10742. Armagh Observatory, view of entrance elevation.

on the whole, St. Catherine’s is a reflection of Johnston’s loss of interest in

provincial commissions (apart from country houses) after his move to Dublin.

The major loss in Johnston’s ecclesiastical architecture was the destruction by

fire in 1860 of St. Andrew’s church in Dublin. In May 1793, a committee was

appointed to carry out rebuilding of the church, which had become ruinous.23

The architect was a John Hartwell, and it was found possible to use part of the

original walls in the new structure, thus preserving the unusual elliptical plan.

The church was used by the Members of the adjoining Parliament House, and

in 1799, with little perception of what was to befall the Irish Parliament in the

following year, they voted £ 1,000

“to enable the parish to complete the repair of the church, and to make

proper accommodation in it for the reception of the Members of the House

of Commons and their Speaker.”24

In 1800 Johnston succeeded Hartwell as architect and worked on the church

until it was re-opened in 1807. This work, his first major commission in Dublin,

included the arrangement of the interior and the design for a gothic tower

(which was never built).25

23) An interesting account of the work on St. Andrew’s from 1793 onwards is given in J T

Gilbert’s A History of the City of Dublin, Vol. 3, pp. 310 ff.

24) Gilbert, op.cit.

25) Illustrated in Betjeman, op.cit., p. 31.

10843. Armagh Observatory, view of rear elevation.

The exteriors of St. Andrew’s26 were of little interest. The steeple was dull, and

the other elevations, though showing Johnstonian details, show little individual

intervention on Johnston’s part in walls which had probably been built by

Hartwell. The “very splendidly decorated” interiors,27 however, were Johnston’s

own, and on these he lavished his invention, his care and his controlled richness

of decoration. The elliptical plan (Plate 33) measured 80 ft. by 60 ft. and a

gallery surrounded the entire church, which was lit, according to the plans in the

National Library, by four windows in the gallery.28 Now it appears that the

church was, nonetheless, so well lit that special screens had to be placed over

the windows to reduce the light.29 Some other light source must be suggested,

and it seems reasonable to suppose that the church was lit by a large oval lantern

in the roof. No drawings in the Murray Collection describe this explicitly; but

one plan,30 showing the seating arrangement, shows a marked shadow cast by the

gallery on the floor beneath, which could only be explained by top-lighting.

26) I.A.R.A. Coll., PF 4.

27) Gilbert, op.cit., p. 311.

28) The plans show a window at each end of the major axis, and another two, both on the same

side of the ellipse, with the organ between them. St. George’s, too, is lit only by windows

in the gallery.

29) Wheeler and Craig, op.cit., p. 10.

30) PF 4, St. Andrew’s folder, No. 1, top sheet.

109The gallery arrangement showed a reluctance to display the means of support

which can be seen too in the solution adopted in St. George’s. The beams

supporting the gallery were not themselves supported at their extremities by

columns, but were cantilevered on columns set close to the walls. It is recorded,31

further, that these columns were

“not reconcilable to any known order, yet do great credit to the taste of the

architect, Mr. Francis Johnston, who seems to have taken the idea from

Mr. Denon’s drawings of Egyptian ruins.”

45. Bank of Ireland, Dublin, ground floor plan, 1855.

A translation of Baron Dominique Vivant Denon’s Voyage dans la basse et la

Haute Egypte had been published by J. Shea in Dublin in 1803, only one year

after the original publication in Paris.32 This detail has led some commentators

to think that the whole church was decorated internally in the Egyptian style.

The drawings in the National Library contradict this interpretation, as indeed

does the architect’s character. Large scale innovations and experiments were

eschewed; it was quite in keeping with his sense of what was proper to confine

his precocious interest in the Egyptian Revival to scholarly allusions in the

orders.

31) Warburton, Whitelaw and Walsh, op.cit., pp. 510-513.

32) A copy of this edition is in the National Library, Dublin.

I l l46. Bank of Ireland, West Hall.

Brewer speaks33 of the interior as being “irresistably affecting,” and so indeed

it must have been, with light streaming down from above onto the pulpit which

was placed, not in the centre of the church, but half-way along a minor axis

of the ellipse so that it rose up towards the gallery which surrounded it. Directly

behind this pulpit, in the gallery, was the organ, and the pews were arranged

so as to converge to this focal point of organ and pulpit. This must have been

one of Johnston’s most powerful interiors, where he was able to join his love

of ample curves, with the excitement of top-lighting so as to develop the drama

of the Townley rotunda to the solemn ends of the traditional Calvinism of the

Irish liturgy.

Rising on a gentle hill on the north side of the city closing the vistas along

Temple Street (Plate 34), Eccles Street (Plate 35), (and along the later Hardwicke

Street) is the church of St. George’s. Johnston began work on the church in

33) J. N. Brewer, op.cit.. Vol. 1, pp. 122-126.

11247. Bank of Ireland, Chimney piece in West Hall, probably executed by Thomas Kirk from

Francis Johnston’s designs.

1802.34 With a terrace of houses laid out in a crescent plan in front of it,35 St.

George’s takes full advantage of its free-standing situation. Like the Chapel

Royal, it is maintained in impeccable condition, but here also, a re-arrangement

of the east end36 has destroyed some of the gentle drama of the original interior.

The exterior of the ground floor is rusticated. The side elevations, like the

entrance facade, are of two storeys, of five bays. The upper windows of the sides

and of the end bays of the front are tall, semicircular-headed windows, while

34) In the Murr. Coll., PF 4, there are drawings for St. George’s signed by Richard Morrison:

an elevation was illustrated in the catalogue of the I.A.D. Exhibition, no. 89. Grouped with

these in the same portfolio are undated designs for unnamed churches by Henry Aaron

Baker and S. Smith. The Murr. Coll. catalogue describes these and Morrison’s designs,

as “competition drawings” for St. George’s.

35) This crescent plan may have its origin in the crescent of Beresford Place, laid out shortly

before 1790, as a setting for Gandon’s newly erected Custom House.

36) The east end was rearranged c. 1880. Wheeler and Craig, op.cit., Plate XIX, reproduce

an old photograph of the church before alterations.

11348. Richmond House of Correction (Richmond or City Bridewell), Cease to Do Evil Gate,

design by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

11449. Richmond Penitentiary, view of entrance.

those below have segmental tops. A large tetrastyle Ionic portico occupies the

middle of the entrance elevation and supports a pediment behind which rises,

to a height of two hundred feet, the tall steeple which is derived from that of

Gibbs’ St. Martin-in-the-Fields.37 The clock storey and the storey above corre-

spond closely to those of Gibbs’ steeple, but otherwise there are great differences.

St. George’s contrasts the sure succession of the different levels—each rising

smoothly from the one beneath—with the nervous energy of the cornice levels

which cast narrow bands of dark shadow on the white Portland stone. Johnston

made this steeple more substantial than that of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, with

its many perforations, and he modelled this solidity with greater attention to

chiaroscuro than did Gibbs. This is particularly noticeable in the lowest storey

of the Dublin steeple where the columns are deeply recessed into the corners.

The entrance door gives onto a tripartite narthex (Plate 36), in plan not unlike

similar vestibules in Gibbs’ Book38 and similar, too, to the narthex suggested in

Richard Morrison’s designs for St. George’s. Under the spire is an octagonal

vestibule with deep niches, a more strongly modelled space than anything else

in Johnston’s work. In the space on each side of this octagon is a delicate

elliptical staircase. Beyond this narthex, the interior of the church, unlike what

has been described so far, is entirely Johnstonian in feeling, and owes nothing

37) Apart from the design being available in Gibbs’ Book of Architecture, it appears that

Johnston was impressed with Gibbs’ work on his visit to London in 1796. His diary records

for the IOth April “In my walk I stop’d to look at many Churches . . . particularly St. Mary

le Strand and St. Martins in the fields.”

38) e.g. Gibbs, op.cit., Plate 2.

11550. Bank of Ireland, view of Cash Office.

to Gibbs. The interior measures 84 feet by 60 feet and is unusual in being wider

than it is long: as in St. Andrew’s, whose dimensions were very similar, the

longer axis is transversal. Other features recall St. Andrew’s. The body of the

church is very airy and bright, with windows only in the gallery. (In St. George’s,

however, there is a flat ceiling with no top-lighting.) The lower windows seen

on the exterior of the building light, not the interior of the church, but a low

narrow corridor which surrounds three sides of the interior (not the east end),

on the inner wall of which the gallery is cantilevered (Plate 37). Even the doors

leading from this corridor into the body of the church are concealed in the

careful panelling of this inner wall (Plate 38). Here again, Johnston showed

himself reluctant to become explicit in the support of the gallery and one is

11651. Bank, of Ireland, view of Cash Office.

immediately reminded of his remarks on Covent Garden Theatre. He wrote

“This Theatre tho’ smaller is in my opinion superior to that in Drury Lane

both in style of finishing and in the convenience of seeing and hearing, the

Gallerys or Box ranges all hang without support, which gives an elegance

of appearance (when fill’d with Company) not to be described.”39

His liberal use of cantilevered staircases; the supporting columns of the gallery

in St. Andrew’s set back close to the walls; the gallery of St. George’s canti-

levered on an inner wall rather than supported on columns, and the hidden

support of the deep coving and lantern in the roof of the Cash Office in the Bank

of Ireland are all expressions of a preference for apparently effortless support of

39) Diary of his English Journey, entry for 13th April 1796.

117certain members, which shows consistently through his work, and at the same

time explains his lack of affinity with anything authentically Gothic.40

In all of these features there is a close connexion with St. Andrew’s Church.

Here in St. George’s there is the added testimony of the interior decoration as

evidence of Johnston’s skill. This is the apogee of his sparing yet sumptuous

style. The tentative suggestions of brittle elegance of the Primate’s Chapel are a

thing of the past. The unsureness of the Townley rotunda has been strengthened

and clarified in St. George’s, especially in the ceiling (Plates 39, 40).41 There is a

balance of abstract geometrical form and naturalistic detail, a balance of minute-

ness and overall conception of the whole design; above all there is a restraint

and controlled richness, also seen in the interiors of the Bank, which is John-

ston’s mature reaction to the decorative style of Dublin plasterwork in the last

quarter of the eighteenth century.

The first ten years of the nineteenth century, with commissions of such prestige

as the Chapel Royal, St. Andrew’s, St. George’s, the Bank of Ireland, and with

his experiments in the Castle style in domestic architecture, brought full achieve-

ment of maturity as an architect to Johnston. It was a period, however, which can

perhaps be seen as one of regrettable fame, for success brought with it the official

appointment as Architect of the Board of Works and Civil Buildings. In this post

he engaged in the official commissions which were to dominate the rest of his

architectural activity. These, by their nature, demanded the hard and callous

manner of the elevations of the Richmond Penitentiary (Plate 55). But it was a

hardness and callousness which reacted on Johnston himself, and which may

have soured his sensitive touch. For in the last ten years of his life he turned

from architecture to give his attention to increasing his extraordinary collection

of paintings. All this lay ahead, however, when he designed St. George’s, which

takes it place eminently at the very peak of his career. In this church he wor-

shipped, to it he gave his beloved bells, and in its graveyard he is buried. In a

city admittedly poor in steeples that of St. George’s is an inspiring sight, lovely

in all lights but lovelier than anything in Dublin when its white stone is seen in

a harsh white light against the background of a threatening northern sky.

40) As in the staircase of Slane Castle, his structural feats were occasionally too ambitious.

The single span ceiling of St. George’s, receiving no support except from the exterior walls,

threatened to fall in 1836. It was saved by the efforts of the engineer Robert Malet. See

A S h o r t H i s t o r y o f t h e P a r i s h o f S t . G e o r g e , D u b l i n . . . c o m p i l e d . . . b y C a n o n R . J . K e r r ,

M.A., p. 7. See, too, Wheeler and Craig, op.cit., p. 20.

41) A hitherto unidentified drawing by Johnston showing an early—later much modified—

design for this ceiling is in l.A.R.A. Coll., PF 29.

11852. General Post Office, Dublin, view of east elevation.

3. CIVIC ARCHITECTURE

The first important work in Dublin with which Johnston’s name is associated

is the building of Daly’s Club House. This was an exceedingly important com-

mission, “the most superb gambling-house in the world.”1 It stretched from the

Parliament House along Dame Street to Anglesea Street (Plate 41), and there is

an interesting account of it in Gilbert’s History of Dublin,2 in which is quoted the

lavish praise of travellers to the city who, impressed with the magnificence of its

interiors, “concurred in declaring it to be the grandest edifice of the kind in

Europe.” Gilbert, and following him, all other commentators on Johnston,

attribute the design to Johnston.

Now building began on Daly’s in 1789, and it was opened two years later.

Thus, if the building is Johnston’s, it is his first independent work of any signifi-

cance,3 unrivalled in its importance until the building of St. Andrew’s more than

ten years later. His connexion with the Club House must, however, now be ques-

tioned. Firstly, no drawings for this work are known. More important is the fact

that Johnston does not mention it in his letter to Brewer in 1820, a letter in which

1) John Bowden, Tour in Ireland, 1791; quoted by Craig, op.cit., p. 281.

2) J. T. Gilbert, A History of the City of Dublin, 1861; Vol. II, p. 305.

3) This is true if observations elsewhere on the dates and authorship of Rokeby Hall, Bally-

makenny Church and the Drogheda Corn Market are accepted. Work on the Armagh

Observatory did begin in 1789, but the Observatory consists simply of a tower attached to

the rear facade of a small country house (Plates 42, 43).

11953. General Post Office, design of east elevation by Francis Johnston (Mrs. Desmond Forde).54. King’s College, Cambridge, design for Hall and Offices by James Gibbs (from A Book of Architecture).55. Richmond Penitentiary, design for unexecuted elevation by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).56. Richmond Penitentiary, ground floor plan by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).only the most paltry of his commissions was ignored. Johnston would hardly

have ignored “the grandest edifice of the kind in Europe” if it had been his first

important commission. Finally, it can be argued that the style of what still

remains of the building—the centre block, with the top storey altered—cannot

easily be related to Johnston’s work at this time. Dr. Maurice Craig agrees with

me that even in its original form the building was “not very characteristic” of

Johnston.

The importance of Daly’s lay in its relation to the neighbouring buildings of

the Parliament House and Trinity College. The order is exactly that of Pearce’s

Parliament House, and the disposition of orders and masses is not dissimilar to

the arrangement of the Trinity College facade.4 Daly’s was important in extend-

ing the vista from College Green along the newly widened Dame Street in a

coherent and impressive piece of town planning. It is difficult to regard it as

likely that, so early in his architectural career, Johnston had any substantial

responsibility for this major and ambitious project.

An undisputable and more enduring monument to Johnston in College Green

is the Bank of Ireland.5 The Bank opened negotiations to buy the Parliament

House in March 1802. In August 1802 a competition for designs to convert the

building into a bank was announced. There was some initial difficulty in award-

ing the first premium to any one of the thirty-five competitors, and independently

of the competition, and before announcing the result, the Board of the Bank

appointed Francis Johnston as its architect.6 The foundation stone for the new

work was laid on 8 March 1804. The conditions of sale stipulated that the

chambers of the Lords and Commons be altered. It was also thought desirable

that the exterior of the building should be made more uniform and more orna-

mental. The condition of the Parliament House, before alterations, can be seen

from a plan prepared for the 1802 competition (Plate 44). By comparing this

with a plan of the Bank in 1855 (Plate 45) the main outlines of Johnston’s

structural changes can be seen. Firstly, the House of Lords (Plate 45, A) and

Gandon’s approach to it were left unaltered. The House of Commons (Plate

45, B) on the other hand was subdivided into offices but Pearce’s corridor sur-

rounding three sides of the House was unchanged. The space between the

Commons and the portico was extended slightly to the east and became the Cash

Office (Plate 45, C). There were considerable additions in the north-west corner

of the plan, which include a handsome gateway to the guard-house. The main

external changes, however, affected the quadrants. Robert Parke’s “piazza” was

eliminated by rebuilding the western quadrant wall between the free standing

columns which had screened it; and Gandon’s screen wall joining the front

portico to his House of Lords portico on the east was brought slightly forward

and received engaged columns. As Curran has pointed out,7 most of these ideas

4) Daly’s, however, unlike Trinity west front, has undiminished pilasters.

5) An invaluable history of the building of the Parliament House and its subsequent history

as the Bank is contained in C. P. Curran’s appendix to F. G. Hall’s The Bank of Ireland

1783-1946; Dublin and Oxford, 1949.

6) The first premium was awarded to a design signed T.V.; second to John Foulston and

third to Joseph Woods Jr.

7) Hall, op.cit., p. 460.

124were contained in the various plans by other competitors, or emerged from the

comments on these projects made by the assessors of the competition.

The external changes made by Johnston are, in a way, typical of his fondness

for symmetry and of his lack of appreciation of the Picturesque. Gandon’s screen

wall was rather dreary, and can only have gained by being enlivened by the

Portland stone of the engaged columns. But a description of Parke’s “piazza”

given by Curran8 is phrased in terms which speak of its unusually picturesque

quality. Picturesque or not, the sober Johnston completed the symmetry of the

building and walled up the piazza.

The East and West Halls of the Bank are simple vestibules decorated in a

strong and robust style (Plate 46). The walls of the West Hall9 are rusticated for

threequarters of their height, with deep horizontal channelling, which contributes

to the spartan feeling of this room. This effect is softened only by wave pattern

panels and the draperies between the lion head corbels. Such draperies were a

favourite theme of Johnston’s. Nowhere did he use them as successfully as in the

Bank where they are an important part of the scheme of the Cash Office. In the

West Hall they are also used in the chimneypiece (Plate 47) which, though

probably executed by Thomas Kirk, was designed by Johnston. Over the mantle-

piece is a tondo with the arms of the Bank. On each side of the fireplace is a

bracket richly carved with a lion’s head from which issues a fold of drapery.

Above the lion heads, the brackets have been given capitals such as a pilaster

might have. The capitals are those of a disguised but unmistakable Greek Doric

order. The echinus may be covered lightly with a leaf design, but the shape,

placed directly over the three-ribbed necking band has the profile of a Greek

Doric capital. This seems a small point but it is significant. The Cease to do Evil

Gate of the City Bridewell (Plate 48) is crowned with a plain triangular piece of

masonry which is supported on a moulding which has the same echinus and

necking band profile as the Bank chimneypiece. At the entrance to the Richmond

Penitentiary the balcony over the door is supported on brackets which have a

similar profile (with a deeper echinus) (Plate 49). The Greek Doric capital profile

also appears on the impost mouldings of the ground floor arcade of the General

Post Office. This allusiveness and insistent return in details to the motifs of the

Greek Doric order characterize his interest in the Greek Revival in his later

work. In his early houses, when the Revival was an innovation, Johnston had

used the Doric and the Primitivist orders as at Townley in a full, if non-monu-

mental, way. Then, just as the public was ready to take a grand monumental

statement of the Revival (Nelson’s Pillar10 was begun in 1808; St. Mary’s Pro-

Cathedral in 1816), Johnston retired into the scholarly allusiveness of the above

examples. His reticence is typical; fine though they were, the grand monuments

of the Greek Revival implied a certain exaggeration of effect which Johnston

could never use.

8) Hall, op.cit., p. 446.

9) Dr. Maurice Craig suggests that the West Hall is still largely by Pearce.

10) The design of Nelson’s Pillar is sometimes attributed to Johnston. Early topographical

guides to Dublin, and more recently Dr. Maurice Craig, all give the design to William

Wilkins and the superintendence of the work to Johnston. The scale of this vast single

Doric column seems to be unlike anything Johnston would have designed. See Patrick

Henchy, ‘Nelson’s Pillar,’ Dublin Historical Record, June-August 1948.

126The Board Room and Governor’s Room are elegant rooms with groined

ceilings, top-lit by pairs of lunettes.11 The key patterns and scrolls are used here

again, and the ribs of the vaults are enriched with gilt vegetation seen on the ribs

of vaults in Charleville, and spring at the corners of the room from little clusters

of three feathers which appear in Townley Hall and in the Armagh Sessions

House. Such details show Johnston’s peculiar attachment to certain motifs, as

if, in the feathers, the acorns, the open fan motifs in window reveals, and the

Greek Doric profiles, he wished to leave an unobtrusive signature of his presence.

The great glory of Johnston’s work for the Bank is the Cash Office (Plates

50, 51). The room is rectangular, 70 feet by 52 feet. The walls are covered in

Bath stone, while the twenty-four engaged columns around the walls are of

Portland stone. These Ionic columns are fluted, and stand on high pedestals

which lift them above the level of counters and desks—also designed by Johnston

—where the business of the room is transacted.1

– High up between the columns,

just under the entablature, are windows on three sides. On the fourth side, which

is the inner wall of Pearce’s portico (where windows would be possible, but high

up in the shadow of the portico would be of unequal brilliance to the other

windows) the corresponding spaces are set with mirrors. Above the entablature

rises a deep coving which opens into a rectangular lantern with a flat ceiling,

measuring 50 feet by 30 feet.

The lightness of the room is characteristic of Johnston’s contemporary in-

teriors at St. George’s and St. Andrew’s. The ceiling arrangement, although it is

more elaborate than in the other two interiors, shares with them an expression

of Johnston’s interest in concealed support—the ribs of the deep coving sup-

porting the lantern are cantilevered on the entablature, with the counter-weights

outside, and therefore invisible from the room itself. As can be seen from the

use of the mirror panels, Johnston’s demands on symmetry were as insistent here

as elsewhere, but in no other interior did he organise structure and symmetry

into such a coherent and complete whole. The vertical linear accents starting in

the pedestals and colums of the wall are continued above the entablature along

the ribs of the coving, except at the corners where to continue the line of the

corner columns would have added diagonal accents out of keeping with the strict

rectangularity of the rest of the scheme. The ribs over the columns neighbouring

the corner columns bend across the coving to meet at the point where the coving

opens into the lantern. The mullions of the lantern continue the vertical emphasis

of pedestals, columns and ribs, and the lines of these mullions bend across the flat

ceiling, becoming the ribs which divide the ceiling into square coffers, and knitting

together in a resolved horizontal pattern the vertical accents of the different walls.13

11) Illustrated in Hall, op.cii.. Plates 66, 67. These rooms are a direct reference to Soane’s

Governor’s Room in tin- Bank of England, built in the previous year, 1804-5.

12) In the possession of ihc Bank is an early plan of the Cash Office showing, instead of

engaged columns, a rectangular arrangement of free standing columns surrounding the

area now beneath the lantern. The plan is unsigned and undated, but according to an

anonymous pencil note on the reverse, is probably by Johnston.

13) The arrangement of the Cash Office recalls in some points, notably in the roof, Sir Charles

Barry’s stair court in Stafford House, of the early 183O’s. However, the revived Louis XIV

style of this court is less well adapted to producing the powerful effect of the Cash Office

where the sparing application of rich ornament contributes to the totally organised char-

acter of the whole interior.

127While the overall plan of the decorative scheme is subordinate to the structural

network, the completeness of the design is enhanced by the consistency of the

details. The heavy mahogany counters and islands in the middle of the floor

share the lion heads and draperies of the lantern mullions; the panels in the

window reveals, a favourite motif of Johnston’s used in St. George’s. Townley

Hall and elsewhere, are repeated on the desk fronts; the key pattern of the ceiling

ribs is repeated in the strip beneath the windows Above all, there is a consist-

ency between the character of Johnston’s style in these Bank interiors and the

detail of Pearce’s work of the Parliament House The articulation of the Cash

Office walls with engaged columns is perhaps untypical of Johnston’s style, but

may come from a similar motif in the House of Lords. The high pedestals of

Johnston’s columns are related to the high pedestals of the House of Lords, but

are related also to the lowest zone of the Primate’s Chapel interior. The rectan-

gular ceiling design echoes that of the House of Lords, but can also be seen as a

repetition of themes of the Primate’s Chapel ceiling, and of the hall and library

ceilings in Townley Hall. The repeated use of the Greek fret by Johnston in the

Bank may be an allusion to Pearce’s use of the same motif (in the soffits of the

portico), but the Greek fret was a theme commonly used by Johnston (in

Townley Hall, and St. George’s) independently of Pearce. Thus it appears that

Johnston’s own tastes were unusually sympathetic to those of Pearce, and in

respecting the character of Pearce’s decoration elsewhee in the Bank, Johnston

was working in a style in which he felt fully at home.

Nothing remains of the interiors of Johnston’s General Post Office, but it

seems likely that the “opulent severity” of the exterior was reflected inside in a

style of decoration not dissimilar to that of the Bank and St. George’s u In an

article on Francis Johnston,15 John Betjeman prefaces his remarks with the state-

ment that much Irish Georgian architecture is facade only. Various factors united

to make this unfortunately true of the General Post Office, whose interiors were

rearranged many times before the building was destroyed in 1916. The street

facade alone was left standing. This facade was filled up again from behind with

new building, and the Post Office was reopened in 1929.16

It is, by any standards, a fine Post Office (Plate 52). The street elevation in

cream granite is of three storeys, with fifteen bays arranged in a 5-5-5 rhythm.

The ground floor is rusticated and there are rusticated quoins at the corners

arranged so that the different courses in the quoins are not alternately short and

long, but are all of an equal length. In the middle of the facade is a noble hexa-

style Ionic portico of Portland stone, the only projection from an otherwise flat

facade, the only florid gesture in what would otherwise be another exercise in

Johnston’s “penitentiary style”. The portico spans the public footpath in a

reference almost certainly to Gandon’s similar arrangement at the entrance to

14) There is a sketch in the I.A.R.A. Coll., PF 4, G.P.O. folder, No. 30, for a ceiling which

repeats a scheme similar to that of St. George’s.

15) Betjeman, op.cii.

16) It can be suggested that this facade was probably preserved more as a monument to the

events which had resulted in the destruction of the building rather than in appreciation

of its architectural merits.

1 28the Houseof Lords.17 The pediment over this portico is quite shallow and hardly

breaks above the level of the balustrade which, with a continuation of the deep

cornice of the entablature over the columns, crowns fhe side wings. All openings

in these wings are rectangular, without mouldings, and in the original designs

there was a door in the third bay from the end of each wing. Behind the portico

the ground floor openings have segmental arches and the first floor windows

are semicircular headed. Originally there was a door in the middle of the centre

block.

An interesting comparison can be made between this elevation (Plate 53) and

the design made by James Gibbs for the Hall and Offices of King’s College,

Cambridge (Plate 54).18 Gibbs’ engraving shows a three storey facade which,

though only twenty feet longer than the 220 feet long Post Office, contains

twenty one bays instead of the Post Office’s fifteen. As in the Post Office, these

bays are distributed in an even rhythm (7-7-7) with a central portico which in

Gibbs’ design supports a pediment rising steeply above the balustrade crowning

the wings. In both designs the ground floor is rusticated; in both, all openings

in the wings are rectangular; in both, the first floor windows of the centre block

are semicircular headed. The placing of the doors in both designs is identical.

Johnston took the elevation of Gibbs for King’s Hall and did to it what, in

some senses, James Wyatt had done to Richard Johnston’s elevations for Castle

Coole.1″ Wyatt altered very little of Richard Johnston’s work—in the main block

he reduced the liveliness of the balustrade enriched with urns, he deepened the

cornice, omitted the window surrounds and end pilasters, and made all the

openings rectangular. Further, he reduced the projection of the portico. The

changes, though few, were significant, and with them Wyatt strengthened the

Castle Coole facade into a severe neo-classical design.

In the Post Office, a similar simplification and strengthening is seen in John-

ston’s treatment of Gibbs’ elevation. Although the two facades are of a compar-

able length, the rhetoric of the 7-7-7 rhythm in King’s was reduced. The

balustrade statues disappeared; so did the window surrounds. The pediment was

lowered and the climax of the portico was further reduced by lowering the

columns to the ground and by abandoning the columns on the returns—as at

Castle Coole the projection of the portico was reduced. The order was changed

from Corinthian to Ionic. The changes, like those made by Wyatt on Richard

Johnston’s Castle Coole, were changes from the relief to the planar, from the

opulent to the severe. The levelling of the skyline and the flattening of the facade

are what separate Lucan House from Rokeby Hall. The appeal of an Attic

simplicity was as great in this last great building of Johnston’s as in his earlier

work. But the line, always thin, between such a simplicity and “the hard and

17) A design by Gandon to have an open arcade in the ground floor behind an Ionic screen

of columns at the entrance to the House of Lords, similar to an early design by Johnston

for an open arcade at the Post Office, is a further point of comparison between Gandon’s

House of Lords entrance and Johnston’s Post Office portico.

18) Gibbs,/! Book of Architecture, Plate 33.

19) The schematic resemblance of the Post Office to Wyatt’s Castle Coole elevations was

pointed out to me by Dr. Maurice Craig. Richard Johnston’s drawings for Castle Coole

arc in the possession of the Earl Belmore. They are signed and daled 1789. An elevation

was shown at the l.A.D. Exhibition 1965, and was illustrated in the catalogue No. 39.

129callous manner which can only be called institutional”20 was here crossed. The

grand portico rests uneasily against the side wings which, in their relation of

solid to void, are closer to the hardness of his penitentiaries than to the severe

elegance of his earlier classical work. It seems as if in these side wings, Johnston

showed that he had lost his touch, and it may have been a realization of this

which made him turn from architecture as the Post Office neared completion.

If the nature of Johnston’s institutional architecture was such as to frustrate

his invention as an architect and, as seems likely, to make him emotionally dis-

satisfied with his practice in the last fifteen years of his life, it was nonetheless

sufficient to provide the basis of a fortune which enabled him to provide a

substitute in his fabulous collection of paintings. His very considerable institu-

tional work included additions to the Foundling Hospital, to the House of

Industry, and to the Royal Hibernian Marine School in the Phoenix Park.21 The

projects for which he was wholly responsible include the Richmond Peniten-

tiary,22 the first designs of which date from 1810, the Richmond House of

Correction of 1811,23 and the Richmond Lunatic Asylum, also dated 1810.24

Designs for the Armagh Lunatic Asylum date from 1820, and designs for a

Lunatic Asylum in Belfast, signed by William Murray and Johnston, are dated

1826.

In these buildings, the businesslike approach of Johnston to designing institu-

tional elevations is seen at its most callous (Plate 55). Very occasionally, a

characteristically scholarly detail of appropriate austerity is admitted, as in the

Greek Doric allusions of the Richmond Penitentiary portico, or the Cease to do

Evil Gate. But the routine approach to design is changed in his treatment of the

plan. In the Richmond Penitentiary the priorities of Dance’s Newgate were

dramatically reversed. The excellence of the plan lies precisely in its rejection of

the callousness implied in most earlier prison design. This penitentiary as de-

signed in 181225 and completed in 1816—five years before the first national

penitentiary in England was opened at Millbank—seems to have been un-

precedented at the time in any city in the British Isles.

The plans of 1812 arranged buildings to house more than two hundred people

over two and three-quarter acres. The plan was confined within an extended

semi-octagonal shape measuring 630 feet by 312 feet (Plate 56). The prison was

divided into two halves thus segregating the sexes. Each half was further divided

into three distinct wedge-shaped portions. Each of these wedges had a single row

of cells on each floor and at ground floor level three separate exercise yards,

presumably so that the prisoners from each floor could exercise without having

contact with those from another floor of the wedge. Furthermore, each wedge

20) Craig, op.cit., p. 281.

21) This is now St. Mary’s Chest Hospital. Johnston’s additions, dated 1808-13, have recently

been mutilated.

22) This has largely been demolished. The range facing on to the east side of Grangegorman

Lane still stands and is part of the Grangegorman Mental Hospital.

23) This is now Griffith Barracks on the South Circular Road.

24) This is also part of Grangegorman Mental Hospital.

25) The principles governing the 1812 plan are not different from those governing the un-

executed plan of 1810. Signed and dated plans are in the l.A.R.A. Coll., PF 4.

130was equipped with four solitary units (consisting each of a cell and separate

yard), an infirmary and a work or store room. Each half of the prison had a

separate chapel and, on the street front, a “Shop for Sale of Goods Manufac-

tured.” There were no common dining rooms as there had been in the plans of

1810—isolation of the prisoners and of small groups of prisoners extended even

to eating arrangements.

The revolutionary humaneness of this design is not easily appreciated. John

Howard had published his findings on the state of prisons less than forty years

previously.2″ Reform came slowly and its progress up to the passing of Peel’s Bill

of 1823 is described justly by Sidney and Beatrice Webb27 as “the squalid tragedy

of the prison-house.” Until the first national penitentiary was opened in 1821 in

London at Millbank, its function was served by the hulks; exceptions to the

general apathy were rare and confined mostly to county gaols. Two gaols are

noticed in this regard by the Webbs—those at Horsham and Petworth28—and in

these it may be possible to see forerunners to the Richmond Penitentiary in

Dublin. The separate cellular confinement and continuous employment of

prisoners was an expression of concern in the moral rehabilitation of the criminal

which was the principle on which the Dublin prison was organised. Also inter-

esting is that the initiative for the reforms at Horsham and Petworth was taken

by the third Duke of Richmond, whose successor gave his name as Lord

Lieutenant of Ireland to the penitentiary designed by his friend, Francis John-

ston.29 Whether or not the initiative for reform came from the Duke of Rich-

mond, the thoroughness with which the plan is worked out is a tribute to

Johnston’s ingenuity—the same solution was applied later with equal thorough-

ness and appropriate modifications to the Lunatic Asylum of Armagh (Plate 57)

and to the practically identical asylum at Belfast. The philanthropy which is

evident in these plans considerably mitigates the charges of callousness in the

elevations.

One of Johnston’s last buildings was the Royal Hibernian Academy.30 He

founded the Academy in 1823 and in the following year he designed and built

at his own expense the Academy’s premises in Abbey Street. He offered the first

presidency to James Gandon, who refused it because of ill-health—he died a few

months later. William Ashford became first president of the Academy and

Johnston its first treasurer. The building he designed is modest, as befitted his

nature.31 He used the baseless Doric order in the two columns screening the

recessed porch in the ground floor—the order he had used commonly twenty

years, and more, previously. The four first floor windows with their surrounds

and triangular pediments look as if they could belong to early in the previous

26) John Howard, The stale of the prisons in England and Wales, 1777-1780.

27) S. and B. Webb, English Prisons under Local Government, London, 1922, p. 71.

28) The prison at Petworth was designed by James Wyalt in 1784. See James Dallaway,

The Parochial Topography of the Rape of Arundel in the . . . County of Sussex; New ed. by

E d m u n d Cartwright, Vol. 2 (1832) pp. vii ct seq and plates preceding.

29) The fifth Duke was in his turn a notable prison reformer.

30) Illustrated in Betjeman, cp.oit., p. 38.

31) Drawings for the R.H.A. are in the I.A.R.A. Coll., PF 4. An elevation was exhibited in

the Irish Architectural Drawings Exhibition in 1965 and was illustrated in the catalogue,

No. 21.

131century. The keystones refer still further back in time—to Raphael, Michael-

angelo and Palladio. As befitted an Academy, these solemn allusions were re-

minders of the past.

In 1820 Johnston had written32 “during my life of business, the arts have

advanced from a very inferior state indeed to what they now assume.” The

founding of the Royal Hibernian Academy was an act of characteristic gener-

osity in which Francis Johnston made his last great contribution to the arts of

his country, the greatest contribution of which he was capable in that last sad

period of architectural silence in his career.

32) Johnston’s letter to Brewer.58. Francis Johnston; bust by Edward Smyth

(Mr. Richard Graves Johnston,)

SUMMARY

What has been attempted in the previous chapters is an account of Johnston’s

main architectural works, with an occasional tentative definition of the person-

ality revealed in these works. The main suggestion for a revision of traditional

attributions concerns the early period, before 1794 and his designs for Townley

Hall, when it appears that he acted far more as a spokesman for Cooley than

as an independent designer. The inside of the Primate’s Chapel was an elabora-

tion of a Cooley scheme and Cooley was shown to be responsible for the major

part of Ballymakenny Church. The Drogheda Cornmarket is more likely to

belong to the mid 1790’s than to 1788 where it is usually dated, and it is unlikely

that Johnston played any significant role in the design of Daly’s Club House of

I7K9. Finally, there is evidence that other architects before Johnston were in-

volved in the design of Rokeby Hall and that Johnston’s work there reflects

some of their ideas as much, perhaps, as original ideas of his own. If this survey

is correct, Townley Hall then becomes important as his first major independent

work.

Johnston’s emergence soon after 1800 as the most important architect in

Dublin after Gandon was not wholly predictable from his work before that date.

The first decade of the nineteenth century, with his designs for classical and castle

style domestic architecture, his work for the Bank, his designs for the Chapel

Royal and for the Churches of St. Andrew and St. George and with his official

133appointment to the Board of Works was the period of most varied activity in

his life. From this period of late and rather sudden success, dates much of his

greatest work.

Johnston’s premature retirement from architecture was also noted, and the

suggestion was made that it may have been precipitated by a dissatisfaction with

the type of commission which occupied his time as Architect of the Board of

Works. It is a suggestion which concerns Johnston’s personal life, the details of

which are so elusive. It has been possible elsewhere, however, to feel closely in

touch with the character of the man by approaching him through his work alone.

His foundation of the Academy was an extraordinarily generous and public-

spirited act. The respect he paid to the past, and to the projects of other archi-

tects such as Pearce and Cooley, which he was called on to complete is seen in

the compliments he paid Gandon by inviting him to become first president of the

Academy. No record of professional bitterness is left of his life. His desire to

perpetuate his name, in his choice of very personal decorative motifs and in the

incident of his arms in the Richmond Gate, is parallelled perhaps in his family

pride as seen in his attempt to establish a claim on the Annadale peerage. His

meticulous attention to detail, and the ruthless thoroughness he applied to

understanding and solving the particular and minute demands of different com-

missions show a single-minded dedication of purpose. The search for symmetry

and regularity are related, one feels, to a lucid and well-ordered, if slightly

cautious, way of thinking, which, applied to each different commission, pro-

duced plans which were, above all else, practical and workable. This was a virtue

of the plan for each castle, house, church, market, observatory, hospital,

sessions-house, bank, prison, post office or record tower for which Johnston

was responsible.

Guiding all his judgements was an unostentatious, unpretentious and re-

strained taste. His interiors show only a controlled opulence; there is even a

control exercised in the Chapel Royal which makes a serious rather than a

frivolous attempt to be Gothic. The Cash Office of the Bank is very grand, but

its decoration is firmly subordinated to the structure. St. George’s, and what has

been described of St. Andrew’s, were also very grand, but more important was

the appropriateness for the Irish liturgy with which interiors were made to focus

on the pulpits. In his houses there was a straight-forward arrangement of rectan-

gular spaces, made informal with occasional canted bays or amply curved

interior walls. Spatial drama was concentrated in one point where often, as in

the Townley rotunda, the clarity of line of the rising stairs shared the elegance

of the section of a sea-shell, whose forms seem to have fascinated Johnston, and

many specimens of which are listed in the catalogue of his collection.

Complementing, in a small way, the serious atmosphere of his interiors, and

compatible with the related austerity of his classical domestic exteriors, John-

ston’s primitive orders were never exploited for their potentially overwhelming

expression of austerity. They were used by him in an unostentatious way which

developed finally into the allusiveness of detail of the Cease to do Evil Gate.

Johnston’s use of the primitive orders in the closing years of the eighteenth

century indicates a certain readiness to experiment, if not to innovate. As has

134been seen, his nature was cautious, and we may feel that Johnston would have

been less willing to design the first fully Greek Doric portico in Ireland at

Townley Hall, if Wyatt had not given the lead with at least a modified version

of the order at Castle Coole. The same may be true of his exercises in the castle

style and his use of Gothic domestic interiors. The fact remains that Johnston

realized the potential of these novel forms, and used them in an original and

fully personal way which, because of their development in his hands, became

exceedingly influential.

On a smaller scale, he carried on experiments in decoration and structure

which culminate in, but do not seem to develop beyond, the period 1800-1810.

In decoration, the experiment of the Primate’s Chapel, continued in the Townley

rotunda, became refined into the style of St. George’s and the Bank. A more

insistently inquisitive experiment was that with concealed supports which

achieved different solutions each time it was tried—in the galleries of St.

Andrew’s and St. George’s, in the ceilings of these two churches and in that of

the Cash Office of the Bank.

His initial interest in structure and his attention to details of wood and stone

can be traced to his father’s early instruction and to Cooley’s example. For

stylistic inspiration Johnston looked to greater men. He never travelled, except

once briefly to England, and so his contact with all classical architecture and

with nearly all of the major contemporary architecture was at second hand. As

was to be expected therefore his models were provided by local example and

from books. At the end of the eighteenth century, Gandon’s Four Courts,

Custom House and House of Lords entrance, had dominated the architectural

activity in Dublin and Johnston’s work alludes to Gandon, but in no fundamen-

tal way. The major inspiration came from James Wyatt.

As if to stress the importance to him of the printed word, Johnston chose to

be represented by Smyth by a bust resting on three books. The authors of these

books are Vitruvius, Palladio and Euclid. It is questionable just how significant

Vitruvius and Palladio are to an analysis of his work. The choice of Euclid,

however, was significant. The appeal of Euclid did not lie simply in the fact that

he treated elementary geometrical forms—it lay in the clarity of expression with

which his arguments were conducted. A loose parallel might almost be drawn

between an argument of Euclid and a ground plan of Johnston, for instance the

plan of the Richmond Penitentiary, where Johnston imposed an order on the

different elements of the plan so that, with no irrelevance, each part in its

relation to the other parts and in its relation to the whole plan might present an

illustration of an argument for prison reform.

More so than to any other architectural publication, it was to Gibbs’ Book of

Architecture that he turned. Even in this a parallel can be drawn with Wyatt

who, at Newtownmountkennedy House, had adapted Gibbs’ version {Book of

Architecture, Plate LXll) of Palladio’s Villa Pisani. References to Gibbs’ book

appear in St. George’s and in the General Post Office, where, however,

Johnston’s strong personality asserted itself, and the interest in St. George’s

and the Post Office remains primarily an interest in Johnston’s independent

contribution.

135Despite the neo-classicism of some of his work, Johnston was cut off from

much contemporary thought, probably due to his isolation in Ireland. His

revolution was always gentle. He was no Romantic. He was too sensible ever

to design an architectural fantasy, and of too practical a turn of mind to under-

stand what the Earl of Charleville really wanted of him. Scarce though personal

details are, it is genuinely possible to see from his work the kind of man he was.

and to see that at all times he was a dedicated worker, often a designer of genuine

inspiration, and occasionally an architect of very great distinction.

13d1. Biographies of Francis Johnston, and general accounts of his career.

Architectural Publication Society. The Dictionary of Architecture, compiled and ed. by

W. Papworth, 8 vols., London, 1853-1892, Vol. IV.

Betjeman, J. ‘Francis Johnston, Irish Architect,’ The Pavilion, ed. by M. Evans, London, 1946.

Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. X, 1908.

Henchy, P. ‘Francis Johnston, Architect,’ Dublin Historical Record, December 1949-February

1950.

O’Lochlainn, C. ‘Francis Johnston; Architect,’ The Irish Book Lover, May 1942.

2. General.

Ames, W. ‘The completion of Stafford House,’ Essays . . . presented to Rudolf Wittkower,

London, 1967.

Bell, T. An Essay on the origin and progress of Gothic architecture . . ., Dublin, 1829.

Brewer, J. N. The beauties of Ireland, 2 vols., London, 1825.

Catalogue of the Johnstonian Collection (see Introduction, page 62).

Childers, S. E. and R. Stewart. The story of the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, amplified and

reprinted by R. F. Nation, London, 1921.

The Citizen, or, Dublin Monthly Magazine, Vol. IV, July-December 1941.

Cornforth, J. ‘Mount Kennedy House,’ Country Life, October 28 and November 11, 1965.

Craig, M. ‘Bellamont Forest,” Country Life, May 28, 1964.

Craig, M., and the Knight of Glin. Catalogue of the Exhibition of Irish Architectural Drawings,

Dublin, Belfast and London (R.I.B.A.), 1965.

Craig, M. Dublin 1660-1860, London, 1952.

Dale, A. James Wyatt, Oxford, 1956.

Dallaway, J. The Parochial Topography of the Rape of Arundel in the . . . Co. of Sussex; New ed.

by Edmund Cartwright. Vol. 2, London, 1832.

Denon, D. V. Vovage dans la basse el la haute Egvpte . . . . 2 vols., Paris, 1802; Translation

published by J. Shea, Dublin, 1803.

Georgian Society. The Georgian Society Records of Eighteenth-Century Domestic Architecture

and Decoration in Dublin, 5 vols., Dublin 1909-13, Vol. 3.

Gibbs, J. A book of architecture . . ., London, 1728.

Gilbert, J. T. A history of the city of Dublin, 3 vols., Dublin, 1861.

Girouard, M. ‘Charleville Forest,’ Country Life, September 27, 1962.

Hall, F. G. The Bank of Ireland, 1783-1946; with an architectural chapter by C. P. Curran,

Dublin, 1949.

Harris, J. Quarterly Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, July-September 1965.

Hayes, R. J. Manuscript sources for the history of Irish civilisation, ed. by R. J. Hayes, Boston,

Mass., 1965, II vols.

Henchy. P. ‘Nelson’s Pillar,’ Dublin Historical Record, June-August, 1948.

Hussey, C. ‘Castle Coole,’ Country Life, December 19 and 26, 1936.

Hussey. C. ‘Lucan House,” Country Life, January 31, 1947.

Hussey, C. ‘Townley Hall,” Country Life, July 23 and 30, 1948.

Johnston, Francis. Letter to J. N. Brewer; Quarterly Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society,

January-March, 1963, pp. 1 ff.

Johnston, Francis. National Library of Ireland, MS.2722, Photostat copy of diary of John-

ston’s English tour, 1796, and notes compiled by J. P. C. Johnston, early 20th century.

Kerr, R. J. The parish and church of St. George, Dublin, Dublin, 1962.

Lord Killanin and M. Duignan. The Shell Guide to Ireland, 2nd ed., London, 1967.

Morrison, R. Useful and ornamental designs in architecture . . ., Dublin, 1793.

Reports from the Commissioners . . . respecting the Public Records of Ireland, 1810-1815.

Rowan, A. ‘Georgian Castles in Ireland,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society,

January-March, 1964.

Rowan, A. The Castle Style, Ph.D. thesis, unpublished, University Library, Cambridge.

Stuart, J. Historical memoirs of the City of Armagh, Newry, 1819.

Warburton, J., J. Whitelaw and R. Walsh. History of the City of Dublin, 2 vols., London, 1818.

Webb, S. and B. English prisons under local government, London, 1922.

Wheeler, H., and M. Craig. The Dub/in city churches of the Church of Ireland, Dublin, 1948.

Wright, G. N. An historical guide to ancient and modern Dublin, 1st ed., London, 1821.

Wright, G. N. Ireland illustrated, London, 1831.LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The following abbreviations have been used :

Nat. Libr. National Library of Ireland.

Lawr. Coll. Lawrence Collection of photographic views, Nat. Libr.

Frontispiece : Francis Johnston ; from the engraving by H. Meyer after Thomas Clement

Thompson (National Gallery of Ireland).

1. Towney Hall, entrance elevation.

2. Townley Hall, kitchen wing.

3. Townley Hall, ground floor plan by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

4. Townley Hall, staircase.

5. Townley Hall, entrance hall.

6. Ballymakenny Church, design for west front by Thomas Cooley (Nat. Libr.).

7. Kells Church, design for west front by Thomas Cooley (Nat. Libr.).

8. Rokeby Hall, entrance elevation.

9. Lucan House, entrance elevation.

10. Rokeby Hall, ground floor plan (Nat. Libr.).

11. Lucan House, ground floor plan.

12. Farnham House (Lawr. Coll.).

13. Cornmarket, Drogheda.

14. Headfort House, suggested alterations for entrance elevation by Francis Johnston

(Nat. Libr.).

15. St. Catherine’s, Leixlip, Co. Kildare, suggested east elevation by Franics Johnston

(Nat. Libr.).

15a. Killeen Castle, unexecuted plan by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

16. Killeen Castle, design for entrance elevation by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

17. 18. 19. Markree Castle, Co. Sligo, ground floor plan by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

Markree Castle, view of south-east elevation (Lawr. Coll.).

Slane Castle, proposed elevation by James Gandon (Nat. Libr.).

20. Glenmore Castle, Co. Wicklow, design for south-east elevation by Francis Johnston

(Nat. Libr.).

21. Glenmore Castle, ground floor plan by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

22. 23. 24. 25. Charleville Castle, Co. Offaly, view of entrance elevation.

Charleville Castle, view of entrance elevation, main block.

Charleville Castle, design of east elevation by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

Primate’s Chapel, Armagh, design for interior of west end, by Thomas Cooley (Nat.

Libr.).

26. Primate’s Chapel, design for interior of west end, by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

27. Primate’s Chapel, view of west end.

28. Primate’s Chapel, view of east end of ceiling.

29. Primate’s Chapel, pilaster capital.

30. St. Peter’s Church, Drogheda, view of steeple (Lawr. Coll.).

31. Chapel Royal, Dublin Castle, view of north elevation (Lawr. Coll.).

32. Chapel Royal, view of east end.

33. St. Andrew’s Church, Dublin, plan by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

34. .St. George’s Church, Dublin, view from Temple Street.

35. St. George’s Church, view from Fccles Street.

36. St. George’s Church, ground plan by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

37. St. George’s Church, view under gallery.

38. St. George’s Church, view of west end.

39. St. George’s Church, detail of ceiling.

40. St. George’s Church, detail of ceiling.

41. Daly’s Club House and Parliament House, from the engraving by R. Havell, after

T. S. Roberts, u. 1815.

13842. Armagh Observatory, view of entrance elevation.

43. Armagh Observatory, view of rear elevation

44. Parliament House, Dublin, ground floor plan, 1802.

45. Bank of Ireland, Dublin, ground floor plan, 1855.

46. Bank of Ireland, West Hall.

47. Bank.of Ireland, Chimney piece in West Hall, probably executed by Thomas Kirk from

Francis Johnston’s designs.

48. Richmond House of Correction (Richmond or City Bridewell), Cease to Do Evil Gate,

design by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

49. 51. 52. 53. 54. Richmond Penitentiary, view of entrance.

50. Bank of Ireland, view of Cash Office.

Bank of Ireland, view of Cash Office.

General Post Office, Dublin, view of east elevation.

General Post Office, design of east elevation by Francis Johnston (Mrs. Desmond Forde).

King’s College, Cambridge, design for Hall and Offices by James Gibbs (from A Book

of Architecture).

55. Richmond Penitentiary, design for unexecuted elevation by Francis Johnston (Nat.

Libr.).

56. 57. 58. Richmond Penitentiary, ground floor plan by Franics Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

Armagh Lunatic Asylum, ground floor plan by Francis Johnston (Nat. Libr.).

Francis Johnston ; bust by Edward Smyth (Mr. Richard Graves Johnston)

PHOTOGRAPHIC ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Armagh County Museum: Bust of Johnston.

Bord Failte: 32.

Country Life, London: 11, 22, 23.

Hugh Doran, Dublin: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, 10, 14, 15, 15a, 16, 17, 19,20,21,24,25, 26, 27, 28,

33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 48, 53, 55, 56, 57.

Green Studio Ltd., Dublin: 34, 52.

National Gallery of Ireland: Portrait of Johnston: 41.

National Library of Ireland, Lawrence Collection: 12, 18, 30, 31.

Sidney W. Newbery, London: 44.

The author is grateful to Mr. Richard Graves Johnston for permission to publish the photo-

graph of the bust of Francis Johnston; to the Bank of Ireland Group for permission to publish

numbers, 45, 46, 47, 50 and 51; and to the Curator of Sir John Soanes Museum for permission

‘Townley Hall – Francis Johnston’s Neo-Classical Masterpiece’

Author: Reviewed by Kevin V. Mulligan

Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies Vol XXVI — 2023

About Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies

Robert O’Byrne et al

TOWNLEY HALL – FRANCIS JOHNSTON’S

NEO-CLASSICAL MASTERPIECE

(Gandon Editions, Kinsale, 2022) isbn 978-1-910140-31-4, 280 pages, 30x25cm, 760 illus, index, €40 hb

review by Kevin V. Mulligan

FRANCIS JOHNSTON’S TOWNLEY HALL, BEGUN

in 1794 for Blayney Townley Balfour

(1769-1856) on an elevated site above the

River Boyne, north of Drogheda, is deservedly

and widely accepted as a masterpiece of neoclas-

sical design and a worthy subject for celebration,

which the building and its architect receives in

this copiously illustrated monograph, produced

by the owners of the building, the School of

Philosophy & Economic Science, to commemo-

rate their fifty-year existence in Ireland.

Exceptionally for a country house of its

size, the historic and architectural development

of Townley Hall has been well documented, with

its significance previously recognised as early as

1948, when, in a time of profound apathy, singular focus was given to the house in a

series of thoughtful and insightful articles by Christopher Hussey in Country Life, ac-

companied by evocative photographs, some reproduced to good effect in this volume.

Later, issues of the Irish Georgian Society Bulletin were devoted separately to the architect

and the building – in 1969 with Edward McParland’s seminal study of Johnston which

opens with Townley Hall, and in 1987 when the polymath, and departing owner of the

131R E V I E W S

house, Frank Mitchell, provided a personal and uniquely insightful exploration of the

building’s evolution, while also revealing Balfour’s discernment as a patron and the vital

contributions made by his sister Anna Maria and his wife Lady Florence Cole. Each of

these publications has informed the various essays in the present volume, though it is fair

to say none of those earlier studies have been superseded by any of the contributions here.

The Dublin-based School of Philosophy has been associated with Townley Hall

since the 1970s, when it first began to use the building as a study centre and residential

retreat, eventually acquiring it and the remaining sixty acres of land on favourable terms

from Prof Mitchell in 1987. It is evident that the School has been a proud and passionate

owner of the property – that is, if one leaves aside the rather strange aberration of the

shed-like excrescence made to Johnston’s extraordinary kitchen wing in recent, and oth-

erwise welcome, works to redeem the wing from ruin. Naturally, the School has found

within the geometry and refinements of the architecture a perfect expression of the

Platonic, and universal, ideals of ‘beauty and truth, harmony and proportion’, which is

expressed first in the foreword, and surfaces as a theme throughout the book, emphasised

especially, for example, in the introduction by evoking Euclid, Vitruvius and Palladio,

and even if perhaps at times this becomes a little overstated, one could not argue with the

conclusion that at ‘Townley Hall we are invited into an environment with a real sense of

everything being in harmony’.

Unfortunately, that sentiment is not entirely applicable to the book, and while the

production reflects Gandon’s usual high-quality design, the chosen structure seems de-

cidedly discordant, suggesting it was formed by committee without the benefits of a dis-

cerning editorial eye (no editor is credited). Arranged into eleven chapters by various

contributors, the first six essays are broken by a colour photographic section which rep-

resent a strong and vital visual record, even if the unfurnished rooms appear strangely

soulless and the exterior looks rather intruded upon by its diminished setting, having now

lost that wonderful relationship to the old parkland so atmospherically captured in F.W.

Westley’s 1948 photographs.

Mistakenly, and very regrettably, the house contents and the historic demesne, its

grounds and gardens, are largely ignored in the book, and these really should have been

subject to individual essays. The first three chapters by Robert O’Byrne do provide a use-

ful introduction to family history and evolution of the building, and all are handsomely

illustrated with family portraits, topographical views, photographs, plans, documents and

maps, though in the latter items the reproduction is hopelessly small, evidently intended

only for the eyes of pixies, a problem that recurs with images elsewhere. The first chapter

sets the scene and outlines the historic development of the site, traces the origins of the

Townley family, its acquisition of lands in Louth and the inheritance of the Balfour estate

and name. The researches of Frank Mitchell and more recent research by Ruth Thorpe

largely inform the evolution of the design in the second chapter, with no new or critical

insights offered. The third chapter, nebulously titled ‘Challenging Times’, takes us beyond

1800 and up to the sale of the property in 1956. The narrative completely flounders here

in what seems like too heavy a reliance on pot-luck pickings from the copious Townley

Balfour papers, without any sense that a judicious selection or serious scrutiny of the pri-

mary sources was made. Consequently, we are left adrift to speculate on the catastrophic

132R E V I E W S

Drawing by Francis Johnston

of east elevation of Townley

Hall, showing the house as

executed

(Irish Architectural Archive /

Townley Hall Collection)

collapse of Blayney Townley Balfour’s finances at his death in 1856, offered little more

than trite references – visually, in starving ‘Bridge O’Donnell and her children’ and in

the idle statement that ‘the family finances would be further adversely affected in the

1840s by the onset of the Great Famine’. Notice of rotting potatoes in neighbouring fields

and the compassionate philanthropy shown by Balfour’s agent in distributing oatmeal to

necessitous tenantry will not pass scrutiny by the Irish country house studies fraternity.

By irrelevant detours into slavery and musings on the collection of Jacobite memorabilia

we are brought back to a more coherent narrative of family succession and their eventual

departure with the sale of the house and demesne to Trinity College Dublin as a short-

lived agricultural institute – the Kells Ingram Farm.

There follows a personal tribute by Michael Telford to Frank Mitchell and his cre-

ation of a study centre there, providing fond memories of the School’s early association

with the house and their ongoing facilitation of public events. This somewhat rambling

account is all very relevant, but would have been better placed later in the book and the

biography of Johnston rescued from the nether regions and introduced here instead.

Consequently Telford’s chapter forms a strange counterweight to Seán O’Reilly’s more

cerebral, if at times impenetrable essay which contemplates the Platonic ideals inherent

in the architectural purity of Johnston’s design and explains the significance of Hussey’s

1948 Country Life articles which, with the assistance of Westley’s powerful photographs,

uncovered ‘the perfectionism of geometric architectural form implicit in its design’.

O’Reilly forcefully claims the house ‘not only deserved its own perfected interpretation,

but demanded it’, concluding that it ‘found that presentation when it was offered for the

widest public consumption’ across the pages of Country Life. The direction of the book

changes again where Brendan Kiernan explores the anatomy of the structure in an excel-

lent account of the building fabric that reveals Johnston’s consummate design skill when

subjugating practical necessity to considerations of beauty.

The final sections constitute an important resource for the architect, beginning

with Michael Kavanagh’s biography of Johnston, essentially a summary of the architect’s

already well-documented career followed by a selection of his works, all superbly illus-

133R E V I E W S

trated, including some of Kavanagh’s own elevations and plans. A more detailed ‘cata-

logue of works’ is similarly illustrated, and provides a useful survey and is really a high-

light of the book, though it was a mistake to combine the architect’s documented buildings

with those only attributed to him on often rather shaky stylistic grounds; instead these

buildings should have been considered separately, and more critically. Better attention

and more careful research certainly would have avoided mistakes such as confusing

Drumsill House in Armagh with The Argory, or describing Kilmore House as Johnston’s

‘ancestral home’; the building in fact is a glebe house acquired by the architect’s clergy-

man nephew. Colum O’Riordan introduces the Townley Hall collection in the Irish

Architectural Archive, drawings that are here beautifully reproduced, with Johnston’s

precise and carefully rendered elevations a tribute to his master Cooley, and still capti-

vating – gloriously triumphing over the modern CAD surveys of the buildings that con-

clude this fitting celebration of the architect and his avowed masterpiece.

‘Bulletin VI 1963 Issue 1’

Irish Georgian Society bulletin VI — 1963
About Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies

‘Shadows + Reflections: The Irish National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge’

Author: Reviewed by Paula Murphy

Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies Vol XXVI — 2023

About Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies

Other links:

http://www.townleyhall.ie/hist…