- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
Great Irish Houses
The Georgian Tradition
By Daniel Finnerty
'I came on a great house in the middle of the night,
Its open lighted doorway and its windows all alight,
And all my friends were there and made me welcome too;
But I woke in an old ruin that the winds. howled through'.
William Butler Yeats
After the Battle of the Boyne of 1690, a new Irish social world began to take shape and the great classical houses of the eighteenth century speak of a more settled time. The Anglo-Irish elite were confirmed in their estates, and a century of relative stability ensued. The great century of Irish Georgian architecture and craftsmanship had begun. Renaissance ideas of symmetry and classical details were arriving in a country where the ancient Romans never reached, and gradually over time they softened and enriched the vocabulary of the Irish landscape.
Beaulieu, situated just a stone’s throw away from the banks of the River Boyne immortalised the confidence of the eighteenth century builders. Here are no battlements or protective bawns. Irish architecture had finally shaken off the shackles of Elizabethan masonry and embraced ‘artisan’ mannerisms, of course arriving a decade late from England. Beaulieu charms the landscape with its wide overhanging eaves and enchanting symmetry. Architecture no longer belonged to the turbulent world of real attack, it belonged now to the realm of ornament and decoration.
