Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in a Time of War and Revolution by Terence Dooley

Author:Terence Dooley [Dooley, Terence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Ireland, Modern, 20th Century, Revolutionary
ISBN: 9780300265118
Google: fBxeEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2022-03-08T20:29:39+00:00

2. ‘A sad picture of the terrible power of fire’

Once the fire was started, trying to quench a raging inferno was inevitably futile: estate firefighting services were useless and fire brigades were too far away and too slow in arriving to be of much assistance. For instance, by the time the police and fire brigade from Trim arrived at Summerhill House in Meath, ‘The fire had gained such a hold that there were no hopes of saving the building.’ The police fired rifle bullets into a large tank of water on the top of the house but the water made no impact on the flames, and nothing could be done to prevent the house being ‘reduced to a mass of blackened ruins’.30 Similarly, in the days after Castlemary in Cork was set alight in September 1920, ‘There were still [flames] licking parts of the building, the walls of which now stand out a skeleton black mass, the very reverse of what the house was in its beautiful completeness.’31 When Castleshane in Monaghan began to burn on Saturday 14 February 1920, the steward, George Morgan, attempted to quench the dining room blaze with a hose but he was quickly defeated by the intense heat and billowing smoke. By the time help arrived, the roof had collapsed.32

A mansion of the magnitude of Castleshane could burn for days and become an attraction of great curiosity and this had further consequences. On Sunday 15 February 1920, crowds of townspeople from Monaghan walked out to witness Castleshane burning: the local newspaper reported that ‘The beautiful lawns around the house were sadly tramped and mutilated by the feet of men and wheels of carts brought to bring the salvaged furniture to a place of safety.’33 The death of Castleshane was vividly captured in a local newspaper report:

In the afternoon of Sunday, the remains of Castleshane House presented a sad picture of the terrible power of fire. What had once been a stately and beautiful building was in a few short hours reduced to a few blackened and smoking walls. The interior . . . was a glowing mass of material of all kinds. The twisted remains of a bedstead could be seen protruding from a mass of brick, and the remains of many other household fittings were in evidence. On all the interior walls the fireplaces could be seen, and this was the only thing to show where the rooms had been.34

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