Tollymore Park, Bryansford, Co Down – house demolished, demesne open to public, with follies

Bence-Jones, Mark. 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. 2772. “(Hamilton, Clanbrassill, E/DEP; Jocelyn, Roden, E/PB) A C18 and C19 house extending round four sides of a courtyard; of which the earliest part was built mid-C18 by James Hamilton, Viscount Limerick and1st Earl of Clanbrassill of 2^nd Creation; whose grandmother was the heiress of the Magennis family, the original owners of the estate.

As first built, the house consisted of a two storey block with one bay on either side of a central three sided bow, and single-storey three bay wings; the entrance door being not in the middle of the bow, but in the bay to the left of it. The architect of this original range is likely to have been Thomas Wright, of Durham, probably very much in collaboration with first Earl. By 1787 the three other sides of the courtyard had been built, all single-storey; the entrance had been moved from its original position to the centre of the adjoining front, and the house already had the long corridors with windows containing roundels of Flemish stained glass, for which it was noted in later years. Towards mid-C19 – by which time Tollymore had passed by inheritance to the Earls of Roden – an extra storey was added to all those parts of the house which had formerly been of one storey only. The entrance front became a typical late-Georgian composition…The demesne of Tollymore is famous for its picturesque scenery and its numerous follies. It is one of the earliest examples in Ireland of a naturalistic landscape park in the manner of William Kent, having been laid out by 1^st Earl of Clanbrassill (then Viscount Limerick) in mid-C18. The follies, gateways and bridges, mostly erected by 2^nd and last Earl of Clanbrassill and some of them probably designed by Thomas Wright, include a barn made to look like a Gothic church, with a tower and spire, gate piers with spires, an obelist, a grotto or hermitage, an elegant Gothic arch with crocketed pinnacles and flying buttresses, and a castellated gateway known as the Barbican Gate. The Tollymore estate was bought by the Northern Ireland Ministry of Agricuture in two portions in 1930 and 1941. The house was demolished 1952; but the demesne is maintained as a forest park and open to the public. 

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