Kilcooley Abbey
Thurles, Co. Tipperary
Sir William Barker, fourth Baronet painted
by Gilbert Stuart, Oil on canvas, c. 1791, 37 1/2 x 47 3/4 in. (95.3 x 121.3
cm) Private collection
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The Archives of Country Life
This
painting of Sir William Barker, the fourth Baronet depicts all the elements in
the eighteenth century that led to the creation of the house we see today in
Tipperary called Kilcooley Abbey. We have the man who built the house, Sir
William, the drawings of the house in his hand, illustrating his ambition and in
the background of the portrait is the ancient abbey that gave the house its
name. This painting was completed by Gilbert Stewart who went on to paint
George Washington, the first president of the United States. This painting of
Sir William which used to hang at Kilcooley also had a companion piece; a
painting of his wife Lady Catherine Barker (nee Lane) which also featured the boat
house which is still identifiable in the grounds of the estate. Kilcooley has
been at times a place of scandal with one early resident using a member of
staff as a human hot water bottle while a butler who shirked his duties as a
father was responsible for a fire in the house in the 1830’s. Kilcooley passed
down through the generations mainly unaffected until 2003 when it was placed on
the market. Since the house was sold in 2008 it has again appeared on the market for sale,
a victim of the recession and property downturn. Kilcooley has now become
someone’s broken dream and today signs of its decline are evident both in and
around the house. Today the estate is protected by a number of security cameras, while these protect against intruders they don’t deter the age old
problem of any country house, neglect, but it has recently been revealed that the house has been sold.
The house was rebuilt in 1843 after a
devastating fire in 1839. The butler of the house who had been sacked by
William Ponsonby Barker packed the chimney in the library with paper and set it
on fire. While it may have been his intention only to start a chimney fire to
inconvenience the household, the plan back fired when the whole house burnt
down.
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Photograph by Ellie Ross
Kilcooley is situated on the
Kilkenny-Tipperary border, four miles from the village of Urlingford. The
nearby ancient abbey of Kilcooley which gave the later Barker mansion its name
is situated 500 yards away from the house. It was founded in 1182 for the
Cistercians when lands were granted to them by Donal Mor O’Brien. It was burnt
down in 1445, rebuilt and was often lived in as an occasional residence by the
Barker family when it entered their ownership. During the mid-sixteenth century was the property of the Earl of Ormonde from whom in
1636, Sir Jerome Alexander purchased Kilcooley Abbey for £4,200. After his death
the Cistercian Abbey became a dwelling for his daughter Elizabeth and her
husband Sir William Barker until the end of the century. William Barker was
granted 3,300 acres in Limerick in 1667 and 1,300 acres in Tipperary in 1678.
He was made a Baronet in 1676 with the title of Baronet Barker of Bocking Hall
in Essex which his son mortgaged when he came to Ireland in 1725. His son also
named William was born in 1677 became the second Baronet on the death of his
father in either 1717 or 1719. He married Catherine Keck and their son William
was born in 1704 and became the third baronet after the death of his father in
1746.
The ancient Kilcooley Abbey, which gave the
house its name, was founded in 1182 for the Cistercians when lands were granted
to them by Donal Mor O’Brien. It was burnt down in 1445 and rebuilt to be later
lived in as an occasional residence by the Barker family.
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Photograph by Ellie Ross
It had always been the intention of the Barker
family to improve the Kilcooley estate and rather then living in the ancient abbey they hoped to replace it with a proper mansion. In the 1720’s the second baronet intended to develop
a market town with build a suitable gentleman’s residence nearby. He was a
sensible man did not want to commit himself financially to such a large
undertaking as building a new house at Kilcooley. He made little progress with
the project but handed over a financially sound estate upon his death. In July 1736, as a result of the marriage of
William, the future third baronet, to Mary Quin from Adare, his father Sir
William wrote that he came to Kilcooley to build ‘as fine and elegant a private
gentleman’s seat as any in Europe and inland market as ye country could afford,
instead of botching it now about old Abbey walls not proper adapted to be anything
called polite’.
The carved sacristy door with surrounding panels depicting the
crucifixion and St Christopher carrying the child Jesus across a river. A group
of fish and a mermaid holding a mirror can be seen in the lower right hand side
which is said to represent vanity, pride and lust.
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Photograph by Ellie Ross
A detail from the tomb of Piers Fitz Oge Butler who died around 1526 and
is buried in the chancel of Kilcooley Abbey. This is a section from a side
panel that depicts ten of the twelve apostles and was sculpted by Rory
O’Tunney, his name is known as it is clearly marked on the carving. Accreditation-
Photograph by David Hicks
However while William considered his plans and his finances he
sent his son to Tipperary to live in the half ruined abbey. So it was the fourth baronet,
also confusingly named Sir William, who is said to have been responsible for the
construction of the Palladian house but it may have begun while his father was
still alive. A stone was uncovered beneath plaster in the stable yard which
displayed the date 1762 which would indicate that the house was built in the
1760’s rather than the 1790’s as suggested by some. The ancient abbey can still
be viewed through the trees from the garden front of the house and the Cisteran abbey can still be accessed from the gardens of
the Barker mansion though a gate and Gothic arch.
In the 1730’s Sir William Barker, the second Baronet, wrote
that he intended to build ‘as fine and elegant a private gentleman’s seat as
any in Europe and inland market as ye country could afford, instead of botching
it now about old Abbey walls not proper adapted to be anything called polite’.
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Photograph by Ellie Ross
The Gothic arch at the end of the garden frames a view of Kilcooley, this
provides access to the ancient Abbey of Kilcooley which was used by the family as
a home prior to the construction of the house and again when the house was
being rebuilt after the fire of 1839.
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Photograph by Ellie Ross
The fourth Sir William Barker was sent to
Kilkenny College at the age of ten and then to Trinity before completing his
education at the Middle Temple in London in 1757. Sir William, the fourth
Baronet, married Catherine Lane in January 1760, who was the only child and sole
heir of William Lane of Dublin. William’s
father, the third baronet handed his responsibilities for Kilcooley over to him
and in 1764 he became High Sheriff of Tipperary. In March 1770, Sir William,
the third Baronet, died followed by his wife Mary, who died in 1776. When he succeeded
to the estate in 1770, their son briefly contemplated living elsewhere as he advertised
the Manor of Kilcooley, in Finns Leinster Journal, for sale. William retained
Kilcooley and began to develop the estate and advertised for tenants. It is
said that William and his wife were devoted to the continual improvement of the
estate and wanted to increase the protestant population of the parish and
reclaim undeveloped lands. Evidence at this time would indicate
that the mansion house at Kilcooley was built between the time of Sir Williams
marriage and his succession to the estate, which would again point to the house being built in the 1760's.
The crest of the Ponsonby- Barker family of Kilcooley features a bear
which were carved in stone and guard the entrance to the house today. Accreditation-
Photograph by Ellie Ross
The entrance front of Kilcooley Abbey which was the home the Ponsonby family
until it was sold in 2008. The bay windows that we see here were added to the
house after the fire in 1839 replacing the curved bow windows.
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Photograph by Ellie Ross
The
house is a large and imposing two storeys over basement mansion with large
wings that extend out from either side of the seven bay entrance front. The
garden front which faces the abbey is five bays wide with a breakfront centre
of four giant Ionic pilasters, the wings on either have pediments. Kilcooley is
a substantial house and has a floor area of 25,000 sq.ft. Kilcooley was a happy place in his time and
Sir William delighted in entertaining friends, tenants and most of all young
people. Another reason for the construction of the house was because of Sir
William’s growing extended family. He invited his widowed sister Mary and her two children
to live at Kilcooley after the death of her husband Chambre Brabazon Ponsonby in 1762. Within a few years she
had remarried becoming the second wife of Robert Staples, the seventh Baronet
of Lissan, County Tyrone and moved to Dunmore Kilkenny. She left her two
children from her first marriage behind her at Kilcooley. After
her death in 1772, in Sir William and Lady Catherine raised the children as their own.
One of the children, a son also called Chambre Brabazon Ponsonby born in 1762,
would inherit Kilcooley from his uncle. Sir
William took considerable trouble to improve the estate and 1789 he constructed
the lake at a cost of £442 -7-6 to give Kilcooley the water view that he felt
it so greatly needed. The lake was stocked with fish and wild fowl supposedly
shipped from Canada and Greenland. In 1776, he had bought a large quantity of
English Elms at Tullamore to improve the woods. In 1793, he constructed a new
drive way and entrance gates to the north side of the house. In
the grounds of the house are a number of outbuildings that form a courtyard
which were built in 1845. Located near the house is the church built in 1829
where members of the Ponsonby family have been buried in its grounds together
with members of the Barker family in their pyramid shaped crypt.
Sir William took considerable trouble to
improve the estate and 1789 he constructed the lake at a cost of £442 -7-6 to
give Kilcooley the water view that he felt it so greatly needed. The lake was
stocked with fish and wild fowl supposedly shipped from Canada and Greenland.
The elaborate Gothic elevation hides the simple boat house that exists behind
it where small pleasure boats can be moored. This boat house which appears in
the portrait of William Barker’s wife, Catherine, from 1791 painted by Gilbert
Stuart.
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Photograph by Ellie Ross
In 1783, Sir William brought the Irish
portrait painter John Trotter to paint a pair of portraits, one to depict
himself and his wife Lady Catherine and the other to show his sister Mary and
Sir Robert Staples. Both paintings had the landscape of Kilcooley in the
background. William’s niece Mary was disappointed with the paintings
so the artist Gilbert Stuart was commissioned to repaint the faces. It is thought
that Stuart may have been introduced to Sir William by the Earl of Bective. Pleased
with his efforts, in 1791 William asked Gilbert Stewart to return to Kilcooley to paint new
portraits of Lady Catherine and himself. The two resulting portraits are
thought to be the artist’s best work from his time spent in Ireland. Lady
Catherine is depicted working at her embroidery and the other shows Sir William
studying the plan of his house. Gilbert Charles Stewart was born in America in
1755 of Scottish extraction; as a result of the Revolution he left America in
1775 for England. He developed a successful career there but was neglectful of
his finances and as a result he fled to Ireland in 1787 to escape prison. He
was successful in Ireland and became a very sought after portrait painter but he
continued the tradition of accumulating debt and returned to the United States
in 1794. He left behind him a number of unfinished paintings but was
unconcerned by this and was recorded as saying that ‘The artists of Dublin will
get employment in finishing them’. After his return to
America, he painted the famous portrait of George Washington. Despite
selling numerous copies of this famous work it still remained unfinished by the
time of his death in 1828. The Barkers had wanted to have a picture gallery at
Kilcooley in which their own portraits by Gilbert would form the centre pieces of a collection that would be added to by each generation. In the painting of Sir William,
Gilbert has filled it with a number of symbols, the old abbey represents the
past and the long association that the family had with the land around Kilcooley.
While the drawing in Sir William’s hand represented the long future he hoped
his family would have in Tipperary with the drawing of the house he had created.
Gilbert took some artistic licence with the architectural elements of the
centuries old monastic building and made it more romantic than what existed in
reality.
In this portrait of William Barker’s wife, Catherine can be seen the
boat house that still exists in the grounds of the estate today. In the
companion portrait of her husband, he points to the area on the plans of the
house where she is sitting. Accreditation-
Private Collection
Gilbert also created a link between the painting of Sir William with that of his wife, in the portrait of Sir William, he points to the room on the architectural plans
where the portrait of his wife was painted, the dining room which over looked
the Gothic boat house to be found on the entrance front of Kilcooley. Sir William wished to fill the
house with the best that money could buy and, purchased, on a visit to Bath, a
dinner service from the Worcester factory afterwards a special set
of china was made with his family crest, a bear, on it. Silver was procured
for the house from the fashionable Dublin silver smiths Wests. Sir William
lived mainly at Bath but did visit Kilcooley every year to see that all was
being kept in good order. In 1807 it was recorded that a decorator came from
Waterford to do up the whole house prior to Sir Williams return. In October
1818, Sir William died and his will was probated the following month. On his
death his baronetcy became extinct and the estate passed to the son of his
sister Mary whom he had raised as his own child. Chambre Brabazon Ponsonby
inherited Kilcooley on the condition that he adopted the name of Barker. He
married Lady Henrietta Taylour, daughter of Thomas Taylour, First Earl of
Bective in 1791 but Chambre had problems with his finances similar to his grandfather
the third Baronet. Before his marriage could take place, his grandfather Sir William
and his future father-in-law had to pay off his excessive debts. Chambre
died in 1834 and Kilcooley was inherited his eldest son William
Ponsonby-Barker.
In the 1830s, William
Ponsonby-Barker took a human hot water bottle to bed each night chosen from among
the female servants after the family said their prayers in the evening. One night,
a lady he took to bed who produced a powerful stench that it was necessary that
William got up in the dark to fetch eau de cologne. He splashed the liquid
liberally over his sleeping companion. It
was only in the morning when he discovered that his sleeping companion now had
a blue face that he had actually doused her in ink. This louche attitude
towards morals was something that peculated down to the male members of staff
which would have dire consequences for the Kilcooley. In 1839, a woman appeared at the front door of
Kilcooley carrying a child and demanded to see the butler Mr Ashby. It was
insinuated by this woman that the butler had fathered her child but now ignored
its existence and contributed nothing towards their upkeep. William Ponsonby Barker
was shocked by the behaviour of someone who worked under his roof and dismissed
the butler on the spot. Ashby packed his bags but disgruntled by this treatment
by his former employer packed a defective chimney in the library with all the
paper he could find and set it on fire. Being the butler of the household he
was well aware that the chimney was prone to fires. While it may have been his
intention only to start a chimney fire to inconvenience the household the plan
back fired when the whole house burnt down. The
eventual fire from the chimney spread to the roof and soon the whole house was
ablaze. By the following Sunday morning all but one of the side wings was a gutted
smoking ruin. William
Ponsonby-Barker had intended to build another house with ambitious plans being
prepared around 1840 but found that he could not afford to build such a grand
house.
Newspaper reports at the time of the fire reported that the ‘splendid
old Gothic mansion’ had been burnt to the round and was the residence of Mr Ponsonby
Barker who was at the time a Conservative candidate for the County of Tipperary.
The furniture and everything but the family silver and portraits had been
consumed in the blaze. William and his wife who had been sleeping in the house
at the time the fire broke out and had a very narrow escape. They made their
escape by the bedroom window and descended 40 feet by a ladder to the ground
below, a few moments later the floor of their bedroom collasped. The house
was insured for the sum of £13,200 and during the rebuilding the
family again occupied the old abbey.
The interior of the house dates from the
1840’s after the house was restored from the devastating effects of the fire. This
photograph of the entrance hall was captured when Kilcooley was still owned by
the Ponsonby family prior to the sale of the house.
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The Archives of Country Life
The interior of the mansion at Kilcooley
today largely dates from after the fire, the finest space being the large double
height entrance hallway and has a gallery on all sides which provided an ideal
area to display the surviving family portraits. The house was rebuilt by 1843 and it was during the rebuilding that the
bay windows were added on the entrance front which breaks the natural line of
the original house. The renovated house drained the family finances despite
trying to use the ruins of the previous house. The renovations from the
1840s resulted in the interiors that survive today, the entrance hall
which has a gallery also has timber panelling, parquet flooring and ornate
cornicing. Surprisingly the main block of the house has only four, albeit
large, bedrooms as a lot of space on the first floor being sacrificed to
accommodate the double height entrance hall. A basement runs under the entire
length of the main block which may have survived the fire of 1839. Here was housed the kitchen, staff bedrooms
and the wine cellar. One of the wings of Kilcooley housed the nursery wing
where the children’s bedroom and the nanny’s quarters were accomodated.
William died in 1877 and Kilcooley was
inherited by his brother named Captain Thomas Henry Ponsonby. At this time the
estate extended to over 8,000 acres in Tipperary, 3,426 acres in Limerick,
3,260 acres in Kilkenny and 329 acres in Kildare. Together with the house and
estate, Thomas had also inherited his brother’s debt some of which came from
the rebuilding of the house and his first act was to reduce the burden of debt
on the estate. Thomas and his heir, his
son Chambre, received permission to break the entail contained in William’s
will in 1878. This would have previously prevented the sale of estate lands of
which 2,210 were eventually disposed of under the Encumbered Estates Act. In 1873, the heir to the
Kilcooley Estate, Captain Chambre Ponsonby had returned to Kilcooley with his new
bride, Hon. Mary Eliza Sophia Plunkett the daughter of the sixteenth Lord Dunsany.
They were greeted by illuminations, a triumphal arch and a large bonfire at the
entrance to the demesne. Their carriage was pulled by the tenants of the estate
which was a popular custom. This being prior to the death of the bridegroom’s
uncle William Ponsonby-Barker who provided whiskey and beer so that the
celebrations continued all night. When Thomas
died in February 1880, his son Chambre Brabazon Ponsonby succeeded to the
estate Kilcooley.
The two storey galleried hall is top lit by a glazed dome and is surrounded
by a gallery on all sides, where the family portraits were displayed. Accreditation-
The Archives of Country Life
In
1880 when Captain Chambre Ponsonby inherited the Kilcooley Estate, seeing no
future in Ireland, he departed for the United States to join his brother-in-law
Horace Plunkett to become a rancher. Horace would become known in Ireland in
later years for agricultural reform but was now in Wyoming which helped
alleviate his health problems. After making some investigations to the
possibility of making a life for himself and his family in the United States Chambre returned to make arrangements to leave Ireland.
He died on the voyage returning from America on the steam ship Oregon
and the estate now passed to his six year old son Thomas. His widowed mother Mary remained at Kilcooley
where she was encouraged and advised on the running of the estate by her
brother Horace. The estate
was put in to the hands of trustees until the young Thomas Ponsonby would come
of age. The chief members of the trust were Thomas’s uncle Horace Plunkett and
Lord Longford. It was on his sister’s
estate that Horace Plunkett had tried to establish his first creamery with a
site being chosen outside the park gates. A meeting of local farmers was held
to establish a co-operative but much ill will was stirred that Mrs Ponsonby
withdrew her support and Horace had to go elsewhere. Mary Ponsonby never liked
Kilcooley and after her children had grown up, she left and moved
to England. She died in July 1921
and had been living in London with her estate being valued at £22,434. In 1900
Thomas came of age which was celebrated when his tenants from his Kilkenny and
Tipperary estates were entertained at Kilcooley. During the celebrations Thomas
was presented with a silver cup and riding whip by his tenants. In
July 1908, Thomas was appointed as a Deputy Lieutenant for Tipperary.
The garden front of Kilcooley faces the ancient abbey from which it took
its name, the central block is five bays with a break front in the centre with
four ionic pilasters.
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Photograph by Ellie Ross
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