Ballyfin
Encyclopedia
Ballyfin is a small village and parish in County Laois
, Ireland
. Located in the Slieve Bloom Mountains
, the village is in the midlands of Ireland
. It is located on the R423
regional road
mid way between the towns of Mountrath
and Mountmellick
.
There are many hill walks nearby in the Slieve Bloom Mountains
. Most of the area is covered in forest. The trees were planted by local farmers on marginal land unsuitable for farming.
Ballyfin Demesne is a 600-acre estate successively home to the O’Mores, the Crosbys, the Poles, the Wellesley-Poles and the Cootes. Over the years, several houses have stood on the site, the present building is a neo-classical mansion built by Sir Charles Coote (1792-1864) in the 1820s to designs by the leading Irish architects, Richard (1767-1849) and William Vitruvius Morrison (1794-1838). The house is considered the most lavish Regency mansion in Ireland. For much of the twentieth century it served as a school, having been sold in 1928 by Sir Ralph Coote to the Patrician Brothers, a Roman Catholic teaching order. Since 2002 it has been the subject of an extensive restoration project and in May 2010 it opened its doors as a small hotel.
is said to have been raised here. Fionn ate the Salmon of Knowledge which gave him untold knowledge. Later he became leader of the Fianna
. In the medieval period Ballyfin was part of the cantred of Laoighis Reta, the territory of the O ‘Mordha, or O’More, clan who lost out in the Laois-Offaly plantations, the most comprehensive settlement of the Tudor conquest of Ireland. In 1550 Edmund Fay was granted a lease for Ballyfin and about this date Ballyfin appears for the first time on the so-called Cotton Map (British Museum) where it is marked as a clearing in densely forested land.
About 1600 Sir Piers Cosby purchased lands including Ballyfin and erected a castle. By 1637 Ballyfin was raised to manorial status but Cosby was on the wrong side in the turmoil of the 1640s and by May 1666 the estate was conferred on Periam Pole, a recent arrival from Devon. His successor William Pole built a ‘modern house’ to replace the Crosby castle and his son, another William (d. 1781), together with his wife Lady Sarah Moore, (d. 1780) daughter of the 5th Earl of Drogheda, set about transforming the demesne into one of the finest examples of the natural style of gardening to be found in Ireland. Centred on its 30-acre man-made lake, the landscape was much admired by Emily, Countess of Kildare, from Carton house in the adjoining county of Kildare who in a letter to her husband described Ballyfin as ‘a most delightful place indeed, much beyond any place I have seen in Ireland’.
William Pole was succeeded by his cousin, William Wellesley (1750-1805), who was the elder brother of Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington and who adopted the Pole name to become William Wellesly-Pole. Preoccupied with his political career in England, Wellesly-Pole left Ballyfin uninhabited for long periods, though he continued his predecessors’ improvements to the demesne, employing the landscape designer John Webb.
In 1813 Wellesly-Pole sold Ballyfin to the young Sir Charles Coote who had inherited the family baronetcy from his cousin the 7th, and last, Earl of Mountrath. The Cootes had been settled in Ireland since the arrival of the first Sir Charles Coote in 1601. An ambitious, indeed ruthless, soldier, Coote (1581-1661) had carved out vast estates in Ireland and been made a baronet by James I, before being killed at the siege of Trim in the 1641 Rebellion. Sir Charles’s descendant and namesake, together with his wife Caroline, set about rebuilding Ballyfin on a magnificent scale. Sir Charles enjoyed ownership of Ballyfin until his death in 1864 when he was succeeded by his son, also Sir Charles, who in turn was succeeded by his brother the Rev. Algernon whose grandson Ralph finally sold Ballyfin in the 1920 as Irish Independence hastened the demise of the Big House.
The estate was purchased by the Patrician Brothers, a Roman Catholic teaching order who ran a much-loved school from the estate, and who in 1928 added a wing to the house. In 2002, a decline in the number of brothers led the order to sell and the school was moved to the nearby village of Mountrath. The estate was purchased by a Chicago couple with strong Irish connections Fred and Kay Krehbiel who partnered with Jim Reynolds, to form Ballyfin Demesne Ltd. which has overseen a nine-year restoration project which has brought the house back to life. In May 2011 Ballyfin opened as a small hotel.
The house as constructed by the Morrisons is austerely neo-classical on the exterior with a thirteen-bay façade broken by a portico with giant ionic columns. The Entrance Hall, enlivened with a richly-patterned Roman mosaic brought back from Italy in 1822, leads into the Grand Saloon in the centre of the house. Notable features of the interior include the richness of the stuccowork and the variety of scagliola deployed while the decoration is enhanced by the exotic marquetry of the floors. Design sources liberally plundered by the Morrisons include Percier and Fontaine’s Palais, Maisons et autres Edificies Modernes (1798) and Iberian Moorish designs as engraved by the Irish artist James Cavanagh-Murphy (1750 – 1814). The inlaid floor of the Rotonda is based on the Lion Court of the Alhambra Palace, Granada, while the ceiling of the Stair Hall is influenced by Coleshill, Berkshire, attributed to Inigo Jones, and included in Isaac Ware’s A Complete Body of Architecture (1756). However, all these disparate elements fuse organically into a masterpiece of early nineteenth-century Irish architecture.
The most notable architectural addition to Ballyfin after the time of the Morrisons was a glass Conservatory by Richard Turner (1798-1881) added at some point after 1855 and accessed through a concealed door in a bookcase in the Library. At about the same date a folly in the form of a ruined medieval tower was constructed on the site of an old limekiln at the highest point of the estate.
The whole house is available for single bookings. Demesne facilities offered include biking, boating and canoeing on the lake, coarse fishing, tennis, croquet, lawnbowls, hurling, Gaelic football, American football, badminton, picnics, horticultural demonstrations. Archery, clay-pigeon shooting, falconry and horse-riding can also be arranged. House activities include a swimming pool, gym with services of a personal trainer, treatment rooms offering the Voya organic seaweed range, wine tasting, whiskey tasting, cookery demonstrations, history tour, traditional & classical music, Irish folklore story-telling.
club called Ballyfin GAA
.
They are currently in the intermidiate hurling final after beating camross last weekend.
County Laois
County Laois is a county in Ireland. It is part of the Midlands Region and is also located in the province of Leinster. It was formerly known as Queen's County until the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. The county's name was formerly spelt as Laoighis and Leix. Laois County Council...
, Ireland
Republic of Ireland
Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...
. Located in the Slieve Bloom Mountains
Slieve Bloom Mountains
Situated close to the geographical centre of Ireland The Slieve Bloom Mountains rise from the central plain of Ireland to a height of 527 metres. While not very high, they are extensive by local standards...
, the village is in the midlands of Ireland
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
. It is located on the R423
R423 road
The R423 road is a regional road in Ireland linking Portarlington, County Laois to Mountrath, County Laois. It passes through the village of Mountmellick en route.The road is long.-References:* – Department of Transport...
regional road
Regional road
A regional road in Ireland is a class of road not forming a major route , but nevertheless forming a link in the national route network. There are over 11,600 kilometres of regional roads. Regional roads are numbered with three digit route numbers, prefixed by "R" A regional road in Ireland is a...
mid way between the towns of Mountrath
Mountrath
Mountrath is a small town in County Laois, Ireland. Bypassed by the M7 motorway in 2010, the town lies on the R445 midway between Dublin and Limerick, exactly 96.5 km from both cities.In 2006 it had a population of 1,435...
and Mountmellick
Mountmellick
Other than that its a 15th-century settlement on the narrow Owenass river with an encampment on its banks at Irishtown. Overlooking this valley with its trees and wildlife was a small church called Kilmongan which was closed by the Penal Laws in 1640...
.
There are many hill walks nearby in the Slieve Bloom Mountains
Slieve Bloom Mountains
Situated close to the geographical centre of Ireland The Slieve Bloom Mountains rise from the central plain of Ireland to a height of 527 metres. While not very high, they are extensive by local standards...
. Most of the area is covered in forest. The trees were planted by local farmers on marginal land unsuitable for farming.
Ballyfin Demesne is a 600-acre estate successively home to the O’Mores, the Crosbys, the Poles, the Wellesley-Poles and the Cootes. Over the years, several houses have stood on the site, the present building is a neo-classical mansion built by Sir Charles Coote (1792-1864) in the 1820s to designs by the leading Irish architects, Richard (1767-1849) and William Vitruvius Morrison (1794-1838). The house is considered the most lavish Regency mansion in Ireland. For much of the twentieth century it served as a school, having been sold in 1928 by Sir Ralph Coote to the Patrician Brothers, a Roman Catholic teaching order. Since 2002 it has been the subject of an extensive restoration project and in May 2010 it opened its doors as a small hotel.
History
According to legend, Fionn Mac CumhaillFionn mac Cumhaill
Fionn mac Cumhaill , known in English as Finn McCool, was a mythical hunter-warrior of Irish mythology, occurring also in the mythologies of Scotland and the Isle of Man...
is said to have been raised here. Fionn ate the Salmon of Knowledge which gave him untold knowledge. Later he became leader of the Fianna
Fianna
Fianna were small, semi-independent warrior bands in Irish mythology and Scottish mythology, most notably in the stories of the Fenian Cycle, where they are led by Fionn mac Cumhaill....
. In the medieval period Ballyfin was part of the cantred of Laoighis Reta, the territory of the O ‘Mordha, or O’More, clan who lost out in the Laois-Offaly plantations, the most comprehensive settlement of the Tudor conquest of Ireland. In 1550 Edmund Fay was granted a lease for Ballyfin and about this date Ballyfin appears for the first time on the so-called Cotton Map (British Museum) where it is marked as a clearing in densely forested land.
About 1600 Sir Piers Cosby purchased lands including Ballyfin and erected a castle. By 1637 Ballyfin was raised to manorial status but Cosby was on the wrong side in the turmoil of the 1640s and by May 1666 the estate was conferred on Periam Pole, a recent arrival from Devon. His successor William Pole built a ‘modern house’ to replace the Crosby castle and his son, another William (d. 1781), together with his wife Lady Sarah Moore, (d. 1780) daughter of the 5th Earl of Drogheda, set about transforming the demesne into one of the finest examples of the natural style of gardening to be found in Ireland. Centred on its 30-acre man-made lake, the landscape was much admired by Emily, Countess of Kildare, from Carton house in the adjoining county of Kildare who in a letter to her husband described Ballyfin as ‘a most delightful place indeed, much beyond any place I have seen in Ireland’.
William Pole was succeeded by his cousin, William Wellesley (1750-1805), who was the elder brother of Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington and who adopted the Pole name to become William Wellesly-Pole. Preoccupied with his political career in England, Wellesly-Pole left Ballyfin uninhabited for long periods, though he continued his predecessors’ improvements to the demesne, employing the landscape designer John Webb.
In 1813 Wellesly-Pole sold Ballyfin to the young Sir Charles Coote who had inherited the family baronetcy from his cousin the 7th, and last, Earl of Mountrath. The Cootes had been settled in Ireland since the arrival of the first Sir Charles Coote in 1601. An ambitious, indeed ruthless, soldier, Coote (1581-1661) had carved out vast estates in Ireland and been made a baronet by James I, before being killed at the siege of Trim in the 1641 Rebellion. Sir Charles’s descendant and namesake, together with his wife Caroline, set about rebuilding Ballyfin on a magnificent scale. Sir Charles enjoyed ownership of Ballyfin until his death in 1864 when he was succeeded by his son, also Sir Charles, who in turn was succeeded by his brother the Rev. Algernon whose grandson Ralph finally sold Ballyfin in the 1920 as Irish Independence hastened the demise of the Big House.
The estate was purchased by the Patrician Brothers, a Roman Catholic teaching order who ran a much-loved school from the estate, and who in 1928 added a wing to the house. In 2002, a decline in the number of brothers led the order to sell and the school was moved to the nearby village of Mountrath. The estate was purchased by a Chicago couple with strong Irish connections Fred and Kay Krehbiel who partnered with Jim Reynolds, to form Ballyfin Demesne Ltd. which has overseen a nine-year restoration project which has brought the house back to life. In May 2011 Ballyfin opened as a small hotel.
Architecture
The house, built in the 1820s by the father and son team Richard Morrison and William Vitruvius Morrison, is widely acknowledged as one of the most important examples of nineteenth-century neo-classical architecture in Ireland and is famed for its elaborate interior design in the Empire style. Originally Dominck Madden (d.1837) was retained and work commenced on a house built to a long symmetrical H-plan a short distance from the present structure. Madden was, however, sacked by the Cootes and the Morrisons employed in his stead. On the advice of Richard Morrison, the Cootes made the difficult decision to demolish what had been completed of Madden’s building and to build afresh on a new site more favourably removed from the stables and farm buildings.The house as constructed by the Morrisons is austerely neo-classical on the exterior with a thirteen-bay façade broken by a portico with giant ionic columns. The Entrance Hall, enlivened with a richly-patterned Roman mosaic brought back from Italy in 1822, leads into the Grand Saloon in the centre of the house. Notable features of the interior include the richness of the stuccowork and the variety of scagliola deployed while the decoration is enhanced by the exotic marquetry of the floors. Design sources liberally plundered by the Morrisons include Percier and Fontaine’s Palais, Maisons et autres Edificies Modernes (1798) and Iberian Moorish designs as engraved by the Irish artist James Cavanagh-Murphy (1750 – 1814). The inlaid floor of the Rotonda is based on the Lion Court of the Alhambra Palace, Granada, while the ceiling of the Stair Hall is influenced by Coleshill, Berkshire, attributed to Inigo Jones, and included in Isaac Ware’s A Complete Body of Architecture (1756). However, all these disparate elements fuse organically into a masterpiece of early nineteenth-century Irish architecture.
The most notable architectural addition to Ballyfin after the time of the Morrisons was a glass Conservatory by Richard Turner (1798-1881) added at some point after 1855 and accessed through a concealed door in a bookcase in the Library. At about the same date a folly in the form of a ruined medieval tower was constructed on the site of an old limekiln at the highest point of the estate.
The Restoration
Having fallen into disrepair over the years, Ballyfin has been painstakingly restored over the course of the last decade. The urgent need for repairs had become all too apparent when a part of the ceiling in the Gold Drawing Room collapsed having been undermined by wet rot. Masonry was falling from the façade and the Conservatory, choked with overgrown vegetation, was in a dangerous state. This attracted the attention of the Irish Georgian Society, who organized a fund-raising campaign. Despite this, the future of one of Ireland’s finest houses was perilously uncertain, until Ballyfin’s acquisition by the Krehbiels. The restoration project has taken nine years – significantly longer than it took to build the house in the first place. Every single aspect of the house from the roof down required remedial attention. Skilled craftsmen worked on the elaborate inlaid floors, repaired the gilding and the stuccowork or treated the stone work of the house which was disintegrating. Overseen by Jim Reynolds, the restoration project combined the conservation expertise of Purcell, Miller, Tritton and John J. O’Connell, Architects,who had previously been in charge of the restoration of Fota, County Cork, another house designed by the Morrisons. Woody Clark acted as Project Manager. The project served to highlight the wealth of traditional building skills that are still available in Ireland. The principal contractors were James Farrell Construction from Carlow while Cornerstone Construction of Cobh acted as the main interior contractors. The Decoration was done by CF Quality Decorators LTD from Laois.The Hotel
With just fifteen rooms for its 600 acre estate, Ballyfin is becoming famous as a unique hotel offering unparalleled privacy, discretion and luxury. It affords guests the opportunity to admire, and enjoy, the union of art, architecture, interior and landscape design which coalesces in the Irish country house. The kitchen is run by Fred Cordonnier, formerly head chef at Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud, Dublin.The whole house is available for single bookings. Demesne facilities offered include biking, boating and canoeing on the lake, coarse fishing, tennis, croquet, lawnbowls, hurling, Gaelic football, American football, badminton, picnics, horticultural demonstrations. Archery, clay-pigeon shooting, falconry and horse-riding can also be arranged. House activities include a swimming pool, gym with services of a personal trainer, treatment rooms offering the Voya organic seaweed range, wine tasting, whiskey tasting, cookery demonstrations, history tour, traditional & classical music, Irish folklore story-telling.
Sport
The village also has a Gaelic Athletic AssociationGaelic Athletic Association
The Gaelic Athletic Association is an amateur Irish and international cultural and sporting organisation focused primarily on promoting Gaelic games, which include the traditional Irish sports of hurling, camogie, Gaelic football, handball and rounders...
club called Ballyfin GAA
Ballyfin GAA
Ballyfin GAA is a Gaelic Athletic Association hurling and gaelic football club located in the village of Ballyfin in County Laois, Ireland.The club colours are green and white.The club grounds are at Cappinrush, beside Ballyfin's Roman Catholic church....
.
They are currently in the intermidiate hurling final after beating camross last weekend.
See also
- List of towns and villages in Ireland k