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Judith Hill, "Gothic: Building Castles in Post-Union Ireland" (Four Courts Press, 2026)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Judith Hill about her book titled Building Castles in Post Union Ireland, published by Four Courts Press in 2026. This book helps us understand some really intriguing castles and both the finished product, but perhaps more fascinatingly, how, why these castles were built and not just any sort of castle, like why do they look the way that they do? What is the aesthetics that went into this? What are kind of the processes that then made that happen, all the different sort of tastes and perspectives that got woven in, and of course, the politics, too. So turns out by looking at, I mean, we're going to look at more than one castle, but even if we only looked at one, there's a whole bunch of things that can be examined through these built structures. So, Judith, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Thank you very much for having me.
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Miranda, could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What sorts of arguments did you want to make with the project?
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So I'm an architectural historian and have spent a lot of time as a consultant, as an architectural historian and have written books on architecture and public sculpture. And I've also written a few biographies as well. And in this book, there's a kind of. There's quite a bit about people and the way they're thinking and the way those ideas and attitudes translate into architecture. So it's kind of, you know, goes between the two to some degree. The reason why I wanted to write this book. There were two things that I was kind of interested in to start off with, and one is Georgian Gothic architecture, which is really denigrated, an area that people tend to dismiss. And I thought this was a bit unfair, I suppose, part Natalie it's the Gothic revival of the 18th century, which wasn't interested particularly in being accurate about medieval architecture. They weren't trying to reproduce medieval buildings accurately. And as the Gothic Revival developed in the 19th century, that criteria became more and more important. So when they look back on the earlier period, they said, well, it's not very good. You know, they weren't trying to be authentic, and therefore the work is not as good as what we're doing. One example would be that if you were to put in a vault in a building in the medieval period, it would have been made in stone, but in the late 18th century, say, they were Quite happy to do that in plaster, or they mixed up styles, that kind of thing. And in the later 20th century, for example, our historians trying to kind of draw attention to the earlier period and say, you know, it wasn't all that bad. We tended to still use the same criteria as people in the 19th century had been using. And so they would say, but look, you know, people were interested in medieval architecture, they did try to be authentic. And more recently, there's been a different approach, which is to think about it more in the terms. Think about early Gothic revival, more in the terms in which people were thinking about it themselves. And that was the strand that I wanted to investigate. And so that was one aspect. And the other aspect that I was interested in as an Irish historian and architectural historian was the Union. So after the, Ireland was part of Britain, but it had its own Parliament building and parliament. And in 1800 there was the act of Union, which brought Ireland much more fully into the orbit of Britain, Great Britain. And one of the results of this was that people who had been the rulers, mostly Protestant, but not all, lost status. And now some people lost their Parliament was abolished and the seats, parliamentary seats, were moved to Westminster, and some of them. There weren't as many seats for the Irish in the Westminster Parliament as there had been in the Irish Parliament. And the power shifted. Now Ireland became an integral part of Great Britain. But. But Great Britain and Ireland, that was the name. There wasn't a new template for unionism. So, first of all, people who'd had a lot of power lost status. And I was interested in thinking about how they responded to that. And at the same time, there was no real feeling for what unionism, what union was. So again, how was that going to be expressed in cultural terms? And so I looked at castles which people did build in some numbers after the Union, and. And just ask myself, well, how did they manage to express what they felt about their status? Were they trying to assert their status within Britain? Were they trying to express some kind of Unionist identity through these very, very elaborate, very expensive gestures, architectural gestures, the castles that they built?
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Okay, so all sorts of intriguing things going on here in terms of taste, in terms of politics, but before we get perhaps some of the more union specific aspects of this, can we talk about what you mentioned, sort of towards the beginning of that answer, about the kind of revival of Gothic architecture generally, sort of why and how are we seeing this interest develop?
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Well, I suppose the first thing to say is that Gothic in the 18th century was a minority taste, so classicism was Very much the default style. And just for example, to look at Dublin, the, the big buildings, the Earl of Kildare's palace, which is now the Parliament building, the old Irish Parliament building, and then later on the Custom house, the forecourse, these big public buildings were all classical buildings. And Then during the 18th century though, there were changes at an intellectual and cultural level which gave place to alternatives to classicism. And one of these was, well, classicism itself was very much a rules based style and it thrived on the idea of authority and the application of rules. And classicism was regarded as an expression of a beauty that was absolute. There was no, you know, that was the be all and end all, if you like. Gradually in the 18th century there was a development towards a feeling or putting value on subjective experience and individual sense of. So coming away from just looking at taste, that was already imposed, if you like. And this opened the door to alternative styles such as Gothic. And then there was other strands. And I'm sorry, this is a little bit very generalized here, but just to give you a flavor, really another strand of thinking in the 18th century was for associative thinking. So something reminding you of something else. Again, that's a subjective thing. And one of the things that was one aspect of this was this idea of the landscape. Gothic architecture was associated with the English landscape. And I will just mention this line from Milton's poem l' Allegro and it says the line is towers and battlements. It sees bosomed high and tufted trees. Now that expressed something that people were trying to achieve when they. Or something that they recognized in the landscape and in Gothic architecture, in medieval architecture. And actually that phrase comes up time and time again in the literature in the period. Now another strand of thought was romanticism. And here Gothic also appealed because Gothic was associated with the past. And so it was seen as something that was native to Britain. And somebody, John Carter, who was a journalist writing in the Gentleman's Magazine at the turn of the century, the turn of the 19th century was campaigning for the recognition of Gothic architecture as the legitimate architecture of England. So you can see that Gothic began to have credence during the 18th century, but it's still very much a minority interest. And it was also something that is not known, not very much is known about it. And during the 18th century we get an interest from antiquarians, so antiquarians today, historians, people who are interested in studying the buildings. And that for building means drawing them, looking at them in detail and understanding their development. So Gothic gradually, people who were interested in those things, turned their attention to Gothic architecture, to medieval architecture, and gradually, but very slowly, really began to gain an understanding of the way the style had developed in the Middle Ages. And just to say that even at the end of the 18th century, this understanding was fairly rudimentary. And so that one of the. An important project in the period was the Society of Antiquaries of London, who commissioned John Carter himself to draw the main cathedrals in Britain. And this was right at the end of the 18th century, 1795, that project started and moved on into the. Into the 19th century. So this is a slow growing process. And now the other aspect of Gothic, so we can see that there's been intellectual changes in the 18th century, and then by the end of the 18th century, we see that it's starting to challenge classicism as a style that actually could convey status and power. And that was one of the questions I asked at the beginning, that when classicism was there for people to build in a style that really did project status, how is it that Gothic managed to upstage it in some ways? And this probably there's plenty of reasons, but one of them is that Gothic was very expensive. And it was also seen as being expensive because it was quite intricate, certainly ecclesiastical type Gothic. And there's William Porden, an architect, pointed out to Lord Grosvenor, who was advising him on building at Eton hall, and he said Gothic would preserve the distinction of rank and fortune because of the ornamentation that was involved. And another aspect of this was that the towers, even without traceried windows and all the rest, just towers and battlements and pinnacles, gave Gothic an irregular outline and gave a sense of magnificence in the building. So a big building with lots of an elaborate skyline and that had a lot of projections and recessions in the facades could produce magnificence. So it's rich and splendid. And Ashridge park, for example, by Wyatt, is a good example of that. And then finally, Gothic, of course, is a framework for heraldry, and heraldry is a way of proclaiming a family's line of succession and therefore power and influence and importance.
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Okay, so there's lots of reasons, then, that are coming together to explain this kind of increased interest. And it sounds like a lot of those are sort of happening across, well, the swath of society that can think about building castles. But to what extent do we also see sort of individual experience and taste influencing what was built? Like, these are not all sort of carbon copies of each other, right?
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Yeah. So I suppose when I chose two Castles in the book. So that kind of two micro histories. One is Charleville Castle in. They're both in County Offaly in Ireland. Charleville Castle and the people who built that. The owners were Charles Bury and his wife, Catherine Bury. Catherine Maria Bury. And then their neighbors, in fact, were the Parsons family, who built Burr Castle or in fact remodeled an existing house. Burr Castle and Lawrence Parsons there was the person that I looked at. His wife didn't seem to have much, didn't play a big role, but Charles Bury's wife, Catherine Maria, played a very big role in the design of Charleville. So I looked at these, the taste of these three people and what was interesting, and we'll talk a bit later perhaps about their differences politically and everything, but they did seem to. Culturally, they were quite different as well. So Catherine Maria and Charles were both influenced by the picturesque filter. And I mentioned the picturesque there earlier. And whereas Lawrence Parsons was very much. He was almost an antiquarian. He wasn't exactly, but he had the mindset of an antiquarian. So with the picturesque filter, I suppose, in the mid to late 18th century, William Gilpin, who is a cleric, he was one of the most influential people in that period in promoting the picturesque. And he wrote books about the Wye Valley and about the mountains of Scotland. And in these he set up the standards of the picturesque. And for him, the picturesque was really about creating a picture, literally with foreground and middle ground and background. And that kind of way of looking at landscape is actually something we use today. And within this you could have a building, and it couldn't. Quite often those buildings were medieval and quite often they were ruins as well. And what made it picturesque. Now, there was a lot of debate about this, but just very briefly was that there should be a sense of unbroken, that the landscape was broken and irregular and rough to some degree, and that the buildings themselves reflected that. So, for example, Gilpin found some ruins were too smooth and not ruined enough really to be picturesque. So that was the way of thinking. And towards the end of the 18th century, Uvredale price would develop this idea of the picturesque aesthetic in terms of irregularities. So just to give an example of Maria Catherine Maria Bury taking on this idea, she herself produced a beautiful watercolor of Penryn Castle. And you can see the castle between two big mountains, and you can see all the spikiness of the towers in front of silhouetted, if you like, in front of a sort of glittering sea. So she'd very much taken on that aesthetic. And for her husband you can see he's taking on the aesthetic when he describes Powys Castle to her in a letter in terms of overlooking a valley, being bounded by hills and mountains and rising from the midst of trees, in the language of Milton's poem. So that was very much their way of looking at medieval buildings. The other way in which Catherine Maria was also had a romantic engagement with medieval buildings that we know of, in that they had a friend, Michael, Frederick Trench, and she wrote a letter to him about her visit to Warwick Castle. Now, a lot of people in those days didn't, when they visited big houses, which they did in large numbers, they didn't tend to visit old medieval, they tended to visit Palladian houses. But one exception to this was Warwick Castle. And people loved Warwick Castle. And Catherine Maria wrote in her letter to Frederick Trench about her encounter with this castle, which is, in its essence, it was a fortress built in the early medieval period, well, in the 13th, 14th century. And then inside there was a palace which was the old medieval hall that had been rebuilt in the 17th and 18th century. But she is looking at the walls and the towers of the, the older fortress. And she says to him in quite elaborate language, that this is the inspiration for medieval architecture, for her love of medieval architecture. And she sees it as the fount, the origin of medieval architecture. And so I think in that sort of language that she's using, she is thinking about what they're trying to build and, or what they're going to build in Ireland. And this to her is a. The model that she will take home with her. So this is, she's, this, this is romantic because she's, she's engaging with it as she feels that she's encountering the past. It's a sort of direct, tangible, visceral encounter with the past. And she talks about the owner, the Earl of Warwick, talking to them about their children's drawings and she, you know, politely listening, but she feels that's an interruption and what she wants is to commune with the past. Now, Lawrence Parsons was not without a romantic sense as well about buildings. And he did a tour of Britain in 1786 and he went to visit houses, but there would be Jacobean and 16th and 17th century houses in Kent. And there were two houses that he was particularly attracted to, and one of which was Hever Castle. And the thing that he loved about this place was that there was, he felt there was a family connection between the Parsons family through his mother and the Boleyn family. So Anne Boleyn had been brought up at Hever Castle in the early 16th century. And he really valued that, that family connection. And I argue in the book that Hever Castle became for him a model for the remodeling of the Burr Castle. But I think the other thing that comes across very strongly in his, in his journal is his love of his antiquarian mindset and approach. He's a very curious man. And now it's interesting to look at his vocabulary. He's not up to date with everything. He doesn't look at the difference between say, Saxon and Norman architecture, which antiquarians of the time were doing that even though they didn't make the finer distinctions that will be made later. But he just calls it all Gothic with a C and a K. And he also uses the word curious to describe things that he sees. And that's a kind of old fashioned word which really talks about the workmanship involved, the intricacy rather than the style of what he's looking at. But the thing about him is he's very curious and interested and he tries to work out how buildings were put together. And that's not what you find in a lot of the literature of the period. It is what you find now. It's what conservation architects try to do all the time. You know, how is a building, how has it developed, how has it changed? But he wrote at one point, I was very puzzled by the way this building, the Raglan Castle, in fact, in Wales, the way this building was so irregular and it didn't seem to relate properly to the landscape. And you know, if you were building it on day one, you just wouldn't build it like this. And he said, I can only. The only way I can explain this is that it must have been built over a long period of time. So that was a revelation to him. Why is it some for us, it's something we would be looking at on, at the beginning. So I feel that he had a very, a very genuine antiquarian mindset. And the way he applied this to his building in Burr is that he took the. He didn't demolish the building that he already had, he remodeled it. And he also wanted to understand the history of the building. And in his remodeling he tried to express that history. So that's the way it was carried through into, into design.
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That's really interesting to be able to trace so clearly kind of this particular person's experience and perspective and what that then means for what gets built. What did the sort of professional architects think of this at the time? Were they sort of influenced by the same sorts of ideas? Were they kind of going, you know what? I get that you're paying for it, but actually that's not a good ide idea. Like, how were they thinking about this?
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Well, I did write about, took a few architects right from the beginning of the 18th century to the end of the 18th century just to see what their thoughts were about Gothic. And I do feel that a lot of the idea for Gothic did come from patrons and as you suggested there, that they were asking architects to do things. And that does seem to be the case for many architects. But actually, what was very interesting by doing this little survey was that there was a huge diversity of approach from architects. So, for example, John Vanbrugh at The very early 18th century was the person actually, he was the one that was saying to his clients, how about thinking about making this castle? He was talking to the Earl of Manchester about Kimbolton Castle, and he said, how about making this garden front, giving it a castle air? He said, you know, this is more in keeping with the history of this building. And at another time, he said to the Duchess of Marlborough at Blenheim, he said to her, you shouldn't demolish Woodstock Manor. You should keep it and plant trees around it and make it picturesque. And so he was really at the start of. He was saying things that people will be saying at the end of the 18th century, but at the time when he was saying it, it was. Was quite new. And then coming not long after him was William Kent, who was an architect who very much worked in a classical tradition. But he had one or two clients who had older buildings and they wanted something in the same style. So he developed a kind of vocabulary of Gothic ornament motifs which he just plucked from all different buildings. He particularly liked og arches, so he put them in, but he might. They would belong to a kind of middle period of probably the. Say, the 14th century. But he would throw in stuff from earlier periods as well into these, into his window designs. So he wasn't interested in history, but he just tried to create a kind of vocabulary of Gothic ornament. And this was taken up. I don't think he, in himself was particularly influential, but his. These ideas were very influential because they were taken up by a man called Batty Langley, who wrote a book called Ancient Architecture Restored, which was published in 1742, and which was basically a pattern book, so that if you wanted to design a door or a window or a temple, here was Gothic ornament presented to you as though it was classical. So classical design was conceived in terms of orders, and that's exactly what Batty Lange did. But he gave it a Gothic version of that. So that was in the library of Francis Johnson, who is the architect of Charleville, and it was in the library of many, many architects and patrons. The third architect I looked at was James Essex. Now, he was a little bit later than William Kent. We're very much in the mid 18th century now. And he. He was an antiquarian. He was born, brought up in Cambridge. He was surrounded by people who were interested in medieval architecture. And a lot of his commissions came for buildings which were wonderful medieval buildings, such as the chapel of King's College and also Lincoln Cathedral. And he himself actually wrote a manuscript which would have been. It would have revolutionized a Gothic revival if it had been published, because it was a very clear and rational appreciation of medieval architecture and its development. But unfortunately, the publication was blocked by other people, and so that didn't happen. But he wrote some things that were published, and you can see that he's trying to put himself into the mind of a medieval builder. So he was well ahead of his time and really wasn't recognized until the 1820s. And then the fourth person I looked at was Robert Adam, who was. Sorry, no, it was Henry Kean, who was a contemporary of James Essex. Now, Henry Kean would be much more of a kind of what you'd expect from that period. Most of his clients were people who wanted classical buildings. But he was a surveyor to Westminster Abbey, and he did take note of what he was surveying and looking after, and particularly the Henry VII chapel with its wonderful fan vaulted ceiling, which was something that was well recognized at the time as a model, really of some of the best medieval architecture. And he was able to apply that to one or two patrons who wanted Gothic buildings. And one example here is Sir Roger Newdigate, who built Arbery hall, who himself was obsessed with medieval architecture. And Henry Kean managed to produce a beautiful dining room for him with this fan vaulting, which was authentic in many respects, although of course, it was made of plaster rather than stone. And also, I think he was able to create a sense of space. He wasn't. Kent was just interested in ornamentation. Henry Kean was thinking in terms of a Gothic space as well. Then we have Robert Adam, who was also a contemporary of Essex and Keanu, but lived a bit longer. So he lived up until the 1790s. So we think of him really as more of a later 18th century figure. And for him, he was interested in castles and in castles as durable and strong buildings. Now, he didn't necessarily associate them solely with medieval castles. He also looked at Roman architecture and saw similar type of building with them. And he expressed all this in wonderful watercolors, which I don't think people at the time necessarily knew, but also in buildings in Scotland, Scottish castles, which all had neoclassical interiors, in fact. And then finally we come to James Wyatt and John Nash, and they are the architects that are contemporary with Francis Johnson and the building of the two castles that I focus on. And they, by the time we get to the later 18th century, there's more knowledge, patrons are more knowledgeable, Antiquarianism has moved on a bit. There's better drawings of medieval buildings. There's preservationists who are very like we would have today, who were interested in building in cathedrals, being in the medieval fabric, being preserved in medieval cathedrals. So Wyatt had to contend with them, and there was a more developed expectation about what Gothic architecture could achieve in terms of producing, of creating houses which projected wealth and status. And so these two architects were able to develop both of them independently developed picturesque castles. And in Nash's case, he in fact knew Uvedale Price, who was really, what, the main theoretician, I suppose, of picturesque at the end of the 19th, 18th century, and who defined a picturesque aesthetic, which was about irregularity, about buildings that were asymmetrical, about buildings that extended into trees and into the landscape and had this kind of congruous congruity between the landscape and the building. All very different from classical architecture. So. Yeah, so that we get, by the later 18th century, we've got a maturing of Gothic Revival in this early Gothic
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Revival, and clearly something that is involving quite a lot of people. Right. You say, you know, you mentioned you focus on two particular castles, but they're not outliers like this part of this kind of wider movement. But you do, as you mentioned, focus on the two castles, which allows us to get into a lot of depth on them in the book. So can you tell us more about which castles and why you picked those two?
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So I chose. Yes, Charleville and Burr. I chose them largely because they had good archives. Well, partly because they had very good archives. I mean, that's obviously important because I needed. I wanted to find evidence that what. It's quite easy to talk about Gothic and roots and past and all the rest of it in a general way, but my aim was to find evidence that this is how people were actually thinking and what they were trying to do. And so the archives for both castles were very exceptionally good. Burgh there. All the archives are actually in Burgh, which is still inhabited by the family. And Charleville, they're a bit more scattered, but there's a lot in the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin. So there's drawings, there's letters, there's journals, there's a poem written for Charleville, obviously commissioned I would say by the patrons. So there's plenty of material. The other thing is that the two of them, as I said before, there's a lot of similarities between them, but there's also enough, enough difference so that I could explore complexities of the period. So they were neighbors, they had equal wealth and status in Kings county, as County Offaly was then known. Their patrimony was exclusively Irish, so they didn't have land in England. They were both MPs in the Irish Parliament. They were both raised to the peerage. But the difference was that Charles Bury came from a fractured family. So his father died when he was was just born. And so he was brought up by his mother who had remarried. So he was brought up in a different house. And when he came to inherit, he inherited a lot. He chose Charleville because of his great uncle who had lived there. So there wasn't really continuity in his life in terms of place. And he was more ambitious, I think, in the post Union world. World. He also voted for the Union and he had a wide social network in England and he employed the most prominent architect in Ireland at the time, Francis Johnson, to design his castle. He also married a very strong minded woman who was financially astute and had a very sophisticated understanding of contemporary culture. And she was. The two of them worked together to build a castle. Lawrence Parsons was different. He came from a very stable family that had become established in Burr, which was then called Parsonstown in the early 17th century. And his relative, also called Lawrence Parsons, had built the house from an earlier building, in fact in 1620. He was a patriot who voted against the Union. So a patriot would be someone who was more focused towards Ireland and Irish interest west. And he voted against the Union he carried. So the patriot really had an ambition for Ireland's prosperity and what he would have called civility. And he really carried this over after the Union in his feeling about Ireland. And as I said before, he was a curious and rational minded person, but he also had romantic sensibilities with regard to his family's history. And I think the key to him is his family and the sense of his family's history. That was what made him tick. And in his. He also, his architect, John Johnson, who was no relation to Francis Johnson, he employed him mainly as a draftsman. So he didn't work closely. He worked very closely with him, but he didn't work. It wasn't a partnership in the way that the brewery's and Francis Johnson, they were a partnership. So the both houses were started about the same time, 1800, 1801, and both had historicized exteriors and the interiors were designed to be modern. But in Charleville it was a Gothic interior and in Birth there was only one new room, really, and that was also Gothic. So there was different circumstances and different talents, and these led to different attitudes to Ireland, subtly different and the Union, and also different approaches to their castle building.
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B
Yeah, I mean, that's really a great comparison where you've got that depth of archive to get into the details and then to have these different castles to look at. So thank you for giving us an overview, obviously, of what is interesting about them. And of course, in the book you go through all sorts of intriguing detail about the intricacies of the design and the building process, which I can't keep you here for 12 hours. We cannot possibly go through all of that now, but maybe you can tell us what were some of the more intriguing aspects to you about those details that you found in the archive in terms of kind of what the decisions were made about what these castles would look like and how this all developed.
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I suppose one of the most intriguing things about the castles was that the design drawings that I found showed the architects and the patrons trying to work out a picturesque design. And one of the things that is important to stress about this period is that the picturesque, as a design method, if you like, was being developed simultaneously in England and in Ireland. So Johnson. Wasn't necessarily looking at what other architects were doing, because they were doing it at the same time. But. And he didn't really have the opportunity to do that, was the Bereaves, for example, did know a little bit about the work of what was going on at Windsor Castle that James Wyatt was doing. And they knew John Penn and Wyatt was designing a castle for him in Pennsylvania Castle in Dorset. And so they did come with ideas, but I think in many ways they were all operating in the same cultural atmosphere, if you like. And so rather than the. These. These Irish projects looking to Britain for a particular way of working, they were more looking to Britain as a. They were living in the same cultural atmosphere and making similar judgments, I suppose. And One of the. The. And so, as I mentioned earlier, the Buries were very much interested in the picturesque and they understood it. And I don't think that Johnson wasn't. In his tour of Britain, he didn't demonstrate such interest in the picturesque. He responded to castles in the way that Adam did. He enjoyed the fact that they were massive and strong and that they should be congruous with the setting as well. But so when it came to designing Burr, to designing Charleville, they kind of. They struggled, I suppose, or you can see them in the drawings working out how to make this castle into something that was modern but also at the same time had this sense of strength and durability. So, for example, as I mentioned, Warwick Castle was obviously a source of inspiration coming from Catherine Maria. And there's a drawing where they have two of the towers from Warwick Castle are very much put onto a keep, but it just looks very awkward. And then you find another drawing which I also, which I've attributed to Catherine Maria, which shows the castle, which seems to me to have been inspired by an engraving of Warwick Castle, in which what is the gatehouse in Warwick Castle, but. But is transposed into a kind of central tower. And then the other towers are placed together on either side of this, and you get a sense of cohesion now and also a sense of the castle in a setting. And then there's a drawing which very much, I think, is the architect's drawing, which just puts this all together very quickly with a few lines, and just shows a building which has a sense of purpose as a picturesque building with a lovely irregular outline for the skyline and also the sense of the way that the building is irregular as well in its facades. And then there's another drawing by Catherine Maria which shows the building in the trees. And in fact, we have. Charles had a survey of the landscape of Charleville Don shortly after he inherited, and also he asked a landscape architect to do a proposal for the domain. And in this proposal, at that point they were thinking of designing a classical building. And the place, the site for the building was in a large open area beside the big forest, which was actually the heart of the domain. And then you can see in the drawing that penciled in is this idea that a castle, when they thought of the castle, they pushed it into the trees. And there's a drawing by Catherine Maria which shows a castle in the trees. So they're beginning to see it in terms of the setting as well. So this. You can see this being worked out in the drawings. And it's the same story really, similar story with Burr that Lawrence Parsons wants to create a castle creator, actually a new facade for his castle here. Actually the back becomes the front and the house is quite an irregular. It's a 17th century house. And on the edges of the house there are these two flankers which are towers that were built in the early 17th century. West of the house was kind of mid 17th century and a more regular actually English influenced house with big windows. So it didn't look medieval at all. Whereas the two towers are very much with bartisans and batter and they're very much military buildings. And you can see in early drawings that he and his architect are thinking of just putting a new facade which erased all the irregularity of the facade that was already there. And then you see drawings in which no, maybe we'll keep the flankers and we'll express them. And then once they got that idea, they thought, well, actually we could put in a few more towers. And so gradually they begin to see the building as a picturesque building, in fact. And as I said, I don't think that Parsons was particularly interested in picturesque buildings. That doesn't come across in his tour. But when he's faced with doing the design and he's also looking at Charleville I might add, because there's notes on drawings which said we have, they have this in Charleville that he's beginning to see it in terms of the picturesque. And of course he. But he is following the contours of the existing building. So that's his sort of antiquarianism coming out. So you can see all that developing in the drawings. And I found that fascinating, I have to say.
- [41:17]
B
Yeah, that is definitely one of the beauties of having such a cool archive to dive into. Because that is. Is really intriguing to be able to trace kind of what they say in the letters and then what's happening in the plans and how the plans change over time. So thank you for giving us a sense of that aspect of it and how it fits into these kind of aesthetic discussions. What about the post unionism of it all? How might we see sort of expressions of unionism in what they put together in these castles?
- [41:47]
A
So in terms of the argument in the book is that they needed, as they needed to assert their position, they needed to position themselves within the union. And in this I felt they needed to assert their status in Ireland still and at the same time to show how they were connected to Britain. And my argument was that this was reflected in their designs. Now in the case of the Charlevilles, the patrons had a very strong connection with English society and they had a very strong feeling for fashionable architecture in England, which was this developing picturesque. But I think they also knew that they could never be more than successful outsiders in Britain and that they needed to establish their place in Ireland. Now, as I mentioned earlier, they didn't really have a very strong position. Charles Bere himself didn't have a strong connection to Offaly, and he chose this, the domain that was actually belonged to his great uncle, who was also an earl of Charleville. And so what he was doing, I think, was trying to create a sort of bogus sense of longevity. And this was largely done through this poem that he commissioned, which I imagine, I suspect was commissioned when the Viceroy came to visit Charleville shortly after Charleville was finished in 1809. And in this poem, he talks about the long line of Charleville, which wasn't true, and also about. He projects a sense of a rural idyll, which of course was equally untrue, and that the castle is part of it, presides over this rural landscape. And he talks about the Countess as being in the terms of the fairy queen of Queen Elizabeth. So it's all, you know, it's all manufactured to give sense of longevity. And the house itself is full of heraldry, is full of what you call them images of the Moore family tree, which was the Great uncle and the buries and Charla and his wife's coats of arms as well. And this was particularly present in the big window over the door. So I think in terms of the castle that they built, it was built in a fashionable, picturesque style. And yet at the same time, I think compared to English castles, the sense of the keep, the main body of the building, it still had a sort of solid grandeur that you would associate with older castles and with a sort of dynastic medieval sense, rather than this that was still there, as well as the picturesque skyline. And also the castle also extended to the side. It had a kitchen court and a chapel. And then the stable building was also incorporated into the castle to give it this sense of extending into the landscape, which was very much part of the picturesque aesthetic. So they had both and the same thing inside that the. The interior design was very modern. They had big bright rooms, they had reception rooms where you could have balls and supper parties, which is exactly what they produced, which was used for the vice regal visit. But at the same time, the centre in equivalent houses in England, all those rooms would have been interconnected. At Charleville, they were interrupted by the big grand stair in the centre from which you could look at the big window with the coat of arms. And that was called the royal stair in the poem by John Doran. And he talks about the splendor of the Charlevilles coming through the coats of arms. So my argument was that they're doing both. They're trying to present themselves as a strong presence in Ireland and at the same time they're making their association with British contemporary British culture with the Union. Now, in the case of Burr, as I said, Parsons was very much influenced by his family and his family background. And he wrote a poem called the Absentees. And his argument was that landed class, if they lived, if they were resident in Ireland, you get prosperity. And if they weren't, you know, you end up with ruin. And that's what's expressed in the poem. And that's what he was doing when he was rebuilding, remodeling, Burr and that he was. He was also more successful in getting positions within the Irish bureaucracy and he was far less interested in. In his work in England. So his focus was very much on Ireland and on Ireland being a productive part of the Union. And in his castle he was expressing that longevity of the family in Ireland as part of this productive and beneficial class in the Union. Yeah, so, and I, I just thought that the, the Charleville was that castle, really prefigured picturesque castles. Whereas the burgh castle, which, with its Gothic facade and the old house still visible behind the big roofs and the big chimneys and everything would. Was prefigured the neo Tudor Revival houses of the later 19th century. So they were on different tracks, if you like, but they were trying to do things in the way they were kind of relating to the Union.
- [48:01]
B
That's really interesting indeed makes for a great comparison of these two castles. And I know you've also thought a little bit about more kind of the longer term legacies of these castles, the links maybe even all the way up to the present. Do we want to conclude with that?
- [48:14]
A
Well, I just wanted to say that unionism, of course, as a. Is no longer relevant in the Republic of Ireland. But that style, the picturesque, is something I think that's traveled through. And obviously the Gothic Revival as well, is something that's no longer part of our culture, architectural culture, but the picturesque is in terms of the importance of the irregularity of buildings, of modernism. Asymmetry and irregularity is very much as a strong theme and also the relationship of the building to the landscape, particularly houses. But this is something which is very much of concern today and of course it now has a new, an even more contemporary twist with climate change. And obviously that buildings have to be responsive on many levels to climate and nature as well as designed landscape. Landscape.
- [49:19]
B
Very interesting indeed to think about those links between the present and the past. So thank you for concluding our discussion on the book with that. Is there anything then we want to conclude our interview with in terms of things you might be working on now,
- [49:32]
A
this book is done well, it's completely different. I'm now working on a printmaker who a friend of mine who died a few years ago and he worked in Drypoint. And again, this is something that isn't written about very much and not valued, I don't think, as much as it might be. And a lot of his interests would intersect with mine. So for example, a lot of his work was connected to mapping and maps and also to cities. I've written about Limerick and he lived in Limerick and a lot of his work is connected to Limerick and its history and his family history as well. Well, and then also to the west of Ireland landscape, to the mountains of Connemara and the Beira Peninsula.
- [50:22]
B
Well, that certainly sounds like a project you're quite passionate about, so best of luck with pursuing that. And of course, while you are doing that, listeners can dive back into the past through the book we've been discussing titled Building Castles in Post Union Ireland, published by Four Courts Press in 2026. Judith, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast podcast.
- [50:43]
A
Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website, newbooks network.com connect with us on Instagram and Blue sky with the handle at New Books Network and subscribe to our weekly substack newsletter@newbooksnetwork.substack.com to
- [51:11]
B
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