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.
“(Garnett/LGI1912) A Georgian house of two storeys over a basement and three bays, with single-storey wings. Large round-headed windows.”
Record of Protected Structures:
Detached Georgian three-bay, two-storey over basement house with single storey wings and large round headed windows.
Summerseat House is a detached three-bay, two storey over basement house located near Clonee in south Meath, near the border with county Dublin. Casey and Rowan describe it as ‘a gentleman’s box ‘ of about 1750, a rough cast square house to which two wings were added about 1800.
The first of the Garnetts at Summerseat was Samuel, the son of John of Balgeeth and the grandnephew of George of Drogheda. Samuel married Mary Rothwell of Rockfield, Kells in 1772. He was succeeded by his eldest son, Samuel, in 1803. His second son, John Paine, settled at Arch Hall in north Meath.
During the 1798 rebellion nearby Dunboyne was the location of an encampment of Wexford insurgents under the command of Fr. Mogue Kearns. On 12th July the rebels attempted to join forces with northern rebels. The church and much of Dunboyne village was destroyed during the rebellion. In 1798 the resident of Summerseat and his wife took refuge in the attic for a week. The rebels tried to batter down the front door and eventually found entry at the rear. The pewter dishes of the house were melted down to make bullets. The rebels stuck pikes in the paintings. The Hamiltons of Dunboyne had a connection to Summerseat.
Samuel married twice and was succeeded by his eldest son also called Samuel. Samuel was born in 1806 and held estates at Summerseat and Rosmeen, near Kells. He married Martha O’Connor, daughter of Rev. George O’Connor of Ardlonan, Rector of Castleknock. Martha’s nephew, Charles O’Connor, the noted Australian engineer, stayed at Summerseat after the famine. In 1835 Summerseat demesne contained 155 acres. The house was described as being a two storey slated house with commodious offices in good repair. The demesne was well wooded and in good repair.
Samuel Garnett died in 1862 aged 87 years and was buried in Dunboyne churchyard. Having no children Samuel was succeeded by his half-brother, Richard. In 1876 Richard held 1195 acres in county Meath. Richard was succeeded by his eldest son, Richard who was born in 1879 and married Bessie Ella Greer of Dungannon in 1901. In 1911 Richard Garnett and his wife, Bessie Ella, lived in the house. The house provides the name for Summerseat Court housing estate in Clonee.
Arch Hall, County Meath, courtesy Colin Colleran photographer facebook page.
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. 7. “(Garnett/LGI1912) A three storey early C18 house attributed, as is the arch in the garden, to Sir Edward Lovett Pearce. Curved bow in centre of front, doorway with pediment and blocking; curved ends, with round-headed windows. Top storey treated as an attic. In the C19, the house was given a high-pitched roof on a bracket cornice, the curved ends being given conical roofs, so that they looked like the round towers of a French chateau. Also in C19, the windows in the attic storey were replaced by rather strange Romanesque windows in pairs. Now a ruin.”
Listed in Vanishing Country Houses of Ireland by The Knight of Glin, David J. Griffin and Nicholas K. Robinson, published by The Irish Architectural Archive and The Irish Georgian Society, 1988.
p. 113. “A very interesting early 18C house attributed to Sir Edward Lovett Pearce. The house is in fact a smaller version of Wardtown, County Donegal. The top floor was altered during the first half of the 19C. In 1814 the seat of J. N. Payne Garnett. Now a ruin.”
A large early Georgian house. Three-storey, nine-bay
entrance front with cylindrical turret surviving. Incl.
Outbuildings
Casey, Christine and Alistair Rowan. The Buildings of Ireland: North Leinster. Penguin Books, London, 1993.
p. 109. “The fragmentary shell of a large early Georgian house whose design has been attributed to Sir Edward Lovett Pearce. All that survives is a three-storey, nine bay entrance front with cylindrical turret-like bows at each end and a broader three-bay semicircular bow at the centre of the façade. Thoroughly reworked in the c19, the façade, formerly of brick, is now drably rendered in cement. It has curious paired Romanesque windows and Italianate sills to the attic storey. Thus an early Georgian castle idiom was here transformed into a hybrid Victorian chateau; conical slated roofs added to the end bows completed the Chambord effect.
“The destruction of Arch Hall is unfortunate as it was one of a small group of Irish buildings – Wardtown in Co Donegal (also now in ruins) is another – which may be considered as descendants of Vanbrugh’s castle style and his geometrical designs, making rare use of bow windows and circular rooms at an early date. Behind the façade the house is only one room deep, built over a brick-vaulted basement. The hall, originally a large space with curved ends, was flanked by a reception room on each side. The room to the r. maintains its original dimensions of roughly 18 ft (5.5m) square. Throughout the fabric, fragments of plaster panels cling to the brickwork, and in one of the corner towers a shallow saucer dome is ornamented with plaster coffering and egg-and-dart mouldings.”
Arch Hall, County Meath, the house shown above, is a tantalising mystery. Who was the architect? When was it built? And for whom? Answers to all these questions, and others, have been proposed and while convincing they cannot be absolutely verified. Today what remains of Arch Hall stands on flat ground in the middle of open fields, and the greater part of the ornamental park with which it was once surrounded has been lost. A painting from 1854 by the Yorkshire-born artist James Walsham Baldock depicts the wife of Arch Hall’s then-owner Samuel Garnett and the couple’s two young sons on horseback with the house visible behind. Evidently at the time it was surrounded by a belt of mature trees but most of these have now gone leaving the building isolated and even more exposed to the elements than would otherwise be the case. At some date obviously it was abandoned and left to fall into ruin but – another question – when?
Arch Hall appears to derive its name from the rustic arch lying some distance to the south of the house and serving as point of access to the original avenue. Placed on an axis and intended to offer an unexpected vista of the property, the arch is composed of a single broad entrance with pinnacle above and flanking buttresses. From this point Arch Hall looks like a very substantial building, but the impression is deceptive because despite rising three storeys over basement the house was only one room deep. Its most striking feature is the nine-bay facade which on either side concludes in cylindrical bows and is centred on a larger, three-bay semi-circular bow. This has a handsome stone pedimented Gibbsian doorcase but the rest of the building was constructed of locally-produced red brick. At some – also unknown – date in the 19th century, the exterior was covered in cement render marked out to imitate cut stone. Presumably at the same time the topmost storey windows were paired in Romanesque style and Italianate sills added, while the end bows were capped with conical roofs presumably in an effort to make the place resemble a French château. Inside the front door was a large hall with curved ends and reception rooms on either side, each measuring some five and a half metres square. These in turn gave access to small circular rooms in the front corners. Despite long exposure, the two end rooms retain traces of their decorative plasterwork, that on the western flank somehow still having a shallow saucer dome with plaster coffering and egg-and-dart moulding. Almost all the rear of the house has been lost, as well as part of the front wall, making Arch Hall’s long-term survival unlikely.
For a number of reasons the design of Arch Hall is usually ascribed to Sir Edward Lovett Pearce. Believed to have been born at some date in the late 1690s in County Meath, Pearce was the son of an English general and an Irish mother (her father was Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1676-77). Most importantly for his son’s future career, General Edward Pearce’s first cousin was Sir John Vanbrugh. The latter appears to have had an influence on the young architect, if only stylistically, but Pearce’s work in Ireland was also shaped by time spent in mainland Europe in 1723-24 during which he studied Palladio’s buildings in the Veneto. Thus while essentially a classicist, he sometimes liked to feature elements of the baroque. Such is the case with Arch Hall if indeed it was designed by Pearce. Another Irish house, alas now also a ruin, with which it has strong similarities is Wardtown Castle, County Donegal. Built for John Folliott, Wardtown is deeper than Arch Hall but, as Maurice Craig noted in 1996, it shares ‘the Vanbrughian feature of cylindrical towers and semi-circular projections.’ In fact the design of the two houses is so alike, the inevitable conclusion is that either they were by the same hand or one was a copy of the other.
So when was Arch Hall built, and for whom? Sir Edward Lovett Pearce died in 1733 so if he were the house’s architect, work on its construction would most likely have begun before that date. At the time, the townland of which it is part, Newtown-Clongill was owned part-owned by the Payne or Pain(e) family: a deed of 1714 records the transfer of 510 acres in the area from John Raphson to William Paine. In 1737 his granddaughter Anne Paine married Benjamin Woodward of Drumbarrow, near Kells, County Meath. Her settlement included the town and lands of Clongill and Newtown-Clongill. Somehow by the early 19thcentury the property had transferred into the ownership of another local family, the Garnetts who were associated with a number of houses in the county, not least Williamstown and Summerseat. The first of them to live at Arch Hall was John Pain Garnett, second son of Samuel Garnett of Summerseat. John Pain Garnett’s middle name would imply some kind of connection with the previous residents but there appears to be none: the Garnetts tended to marry cousins, or else members of the Rothwell and Wade families. Arch Hall was subsequently inherited by John Pain’s son, another Samuel Garnett who in 1841 married Marianne Tandy: it is she and the couple’s two sons who appear in the 1854 painting by James Walsham Baldock. Burke’s 1871 Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain & Ireland list the family as still in residence, but at some date thereafter they must have left and the place began its slide into dereliction. But when and why was Arch Hall permitted this most untriumphant end? So many unanswered questions…
The rustic arch flanked by obelisks to the south of the house on the original avenue provided the name of the house. The arch contains a decorated stone from Neolitic times. Other follies included two bridges over a narrow canal that is diverted from the Yellow River. There was a large lake to the south-west of the house. With a lodge at the entrance gates there was a walled garden and extensive outbuildings.
A local story says that there were two Chilean pine trees planted, one each side of the arch to celebrate the birth of two boys to the Gilliat family. Captain Glennie Gilliat died of wounds in October 1914 while his brother, Captain Reginald Gilliat was killed in action at Neuve Chapelle in April 1915.
Arch Hall is associated with the Payne and Garnett families. The lands at Newtown-Clongill were in the hands of the Payne family from the time of the Cromwellian confiscations. William Paine acquired a lease of 510 acres at Arch Hall in 1714. William had two sons, Lawrence and John. Anne, daughter of John Paine, married Benjamin Woodward of Drumbarrow in 1737.
The house was probably constructed in the 1730s and designed by Edward Lovett Pearce. Arch Hall is one of a small group of Irish buildings in Vanbrugh’s castle style making use of bows and circular rooms at an early date.
In 1835 John Payne Garnett retained the townland of Arch Hall in his hands and had most of the townland under pasture, raising sheep and black cattle. Mr. Garnett’s house was described as a beautiful old-style residence with a fine garden and offices, an artificial pond with a number of islands on which ducks and widgeon feed. On the western boundary was a beautiful decoy. The well-wooded demesne comprised about 350 statute acres. Garnett also kept the townland of Fletecherstown in his hands raising sheep and cattle. The sheep were mostly of the Galway breed and the cattle chiefly the long-horned Irish breed. John Payne Garnett was High Sheriff of Meath in 1821.
John Paine Garnett died 1846 and was succeeded by his son, Samuel. Samuel Garnett of Arch Hall married Mary Anne Tandy in 1841. In 1845 Samuel Garnett, Esq., J. P., was a member of a company promoting the construction of a railway from the south of Ireland to the north, from Limerick to Clones. In the 1850s Samuel Garnett held lands at Arch Hall, Fletcherstown, Oristown and Clongill. Samuel was High Sheriff of Meath in 1858. In 1876 Samuel Garnett of Arch Hall owned 1,336 acres in county Meath. Samuel’s son, John, married Edith Singleton of Aclare but died in 1872 leaving an only son, John, born in 1866, who succeeded to the estates of his grand-father in the 1880s. A Justice of the Peace John died unmarried in 1894.
The property then came into the hands of the Gilliat family who were involved in banking in London and trade in Liverpool. In the 1901 and 1911 censuses Edith Gilliat and her daughter, Constance, resided at the house with their servants.
Arch Hall, the property of the late Mrs. Gilliat, was burned in April 1923. The house was unoccupied at the time. Before it was destroyed, one of the rooms was reputed to be made entirely in gold, from the paint on the walls to the furniture and picture frames. All that survives today is the facade and some remains of the front rooms. Mulligan described it as a “romantic decaying shell.”
Irish Historic Houses 