At Home in Ireland

Five Manor Houses Where You’ll Find Warm Hospitality and a Yarn or Two
 

- Turtle Bunbury

IF YOU HITCH A RIDE on the back of one of the black crows that constantly wing through Irish skies, you will spy hundreds of castles and mansions sprawling below. A century ago, Ireland had more than 7,000 Big Houses, as the Irish call these stately homes. They ranged from handsome rectories for clergy to audacious architectural standouts built by the ruling Anglo Irish aristocracy. With the creation of the Irish Free State in the early 1920s, these country estates quickly fell out of favour; many were destroyed during the Irish Civil War.

Nowadays it’s rare to find one in the hands of the family that built it. As the late Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen said, owning a Big House constitutes “something between a predicament and a raison d’être.” One way owners have kept their houses going is by opening them up to paying guests. I’ve long been fascinated with Ireland’s vanishing heritage, so I set out over a summer to visit five classic Irish homes in which you can now overnight with the lords and ladies of the manor for a taste of life in a Big House.

HOSPITALITY SPRINGS

Ballyvolane House, County Cork

OH, THERE HAVE BEEN many lively nights around this table down through the centuries,” says our Ballyvolane host, Justin Green, fondly patting the mahogany as dinner is served. My fellow guests at Ballyvolane are a family of five Chinese Americans on a whirlwind tour of Europe in celebration of an important birthday for Kitchi, their matriarch.

The long rays of an Irish summer sunset dapple the papered walls of the dining room. Through broad windows, we glimpse Friesian cattle grazing in buttercup-filled meadows and, in a distant haze, the rippling hills of East Cork. “Ballyvolane” translates as “place of springing heifers” and, sure enough, a young cow performs a dutiful skip.