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The Irishness of Irish Architecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Alistair Rowan
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Extract

It was Winckelmann who first suggested that the definitive characteristics of the art of a country lie primarily in its climate and geography. The climate of Greece shaped the customs and habits of the Greeks and it was those same customs and habits which gave rise to the norms and very nature of Greek art. It is a notion such as this which lies behind any attempt to link national characteristics with a national identity in architecture — that idea and, in my own case, a desire to pay tribute to the inspirational character and energy of Nikolaus Pevsner as a speaker and teacher, has tempted me to borrow his title — ‘the Englishness of English Architecture’ — and to tackle the notion from an Irish point of view.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 40 , 1997 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1997

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References

Notes

1 Much of the information and many of the ideas contained in this text — the Annual Lecture to the Society in 1996 — derive from, and are more fully developed in, the introductions written by myself for the two volumes, so far published, of The Buildings of Ireland, North West Ulster (Harmondsworth; Penguin Books, 1979) and North Leinster (Harmondsworth; Penguin Books, 1993). The reader is referred to these volumes for references to individual buildings and for those points not expanded in the notes which follow.

2 The best general guide to Irish medieval ecclesiastical architecture is provided by the three volumes of Leask, Harold G., Irish Churches and Monastic Buildings, Early Phases and the Romanesque (Dundalgen Press, Dundalk; 1955)Google Scholar; Gothic Architecture to 1460 (1960) and Medieval Gothic, the last phases (1960). Much additional information and illustration is provided in the two last volumes of Henry, Françoise on Irish Art, II, Irish Art, during the Viking Invasions (800–1020) AD and III, Irish Art in the Romanesque Period (1020–1170) (London; Methuen & Co., 1967 and 1970)Google Scholar.

3 Vitruvius, Book IV, chapter 6.

4 In the lecture this question was put rhetorically to give emphasis to the constructural sophistication of Irish eleventh- and twelfth-century masonry. I was subsequently asked how I thought the taper in the towers was achieved. My suggestion is as follows: the towers may have been built with a vertical shaft of timber placed at the geometric centre of the tower. This shaft will have risen with the timber platform, from which the masons worked, while the structure rose. Such a shaft would have provided the means both to secure, and to confirm, that the tower was built to a true vertical line. A rotating boom attached to the shaft would provide the means to control the accuracy of the curve of the circle in the plan of the wall as the tower grew. A beam or plank attached to the end of the boom, and set at the angle of inclination of the wall, could then provide a template, when the boom was rotated, against which the outside face of the tower wall could be built. The masons would have built the wall up to the level of the rotating boom when the timber structure would have been dismanded, the platform and the timber shaft raised and the inclined beam adjusted to fit the narrower circumfrence of the tapering tower. The small dimensions of round towers, normally not more than 16 ft in diameter, mean that a timber armature of this type would have been manageable and could have been constructed quite simply.

5 These dimensions are taken from Barrow, George L., The Round Towers of Ireland: a Study and Gazetteer (Academy Press, 1979)Google Scholar which provides an authoritative guide to the subject.

6 A useful account of the early Irish church and of its documented sites will be found in Gwynn, Aubrey and Hadcock, R. Neville, Medieval Religious Houses Ireland (1970)Google Scholar; see also Leask, Vol. 1.

7 For an illuminating analysis of Cistercian architecture in Ireland see Stalley, Roger, The Cistercian Monasteries of Ireland (Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

8 Quoted by Stalley, op. cit., p. 18.

9 Irish castles and tower-houses are surveyed in Leask, Harold, Irish Castles and Castellated Houses (Dundalk; Dundalgan Press, 1951)Google Scholar.

10 Illustrations of the Mint at Carlingford will be found in de Breffney, Brian and ffolliott, Rosemary, The Houses of Ireland (London; Thames & Hudson, 1975), p. 8 Google Scholar. These do not include the mason’s doodles, however.

11 Amusing proof of this point is provided by the ham-fisted treatment of the newel of the thirteenth-century spiral stair in Archbishop Henry of London’s south transept at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Here someone, used to the Irish pattern, has knocked out huge sections of the newel to turn a dark and nasty Anglo-Norman stair into something which is similar to the Irish pattern, though a cruder version of it. An elegant version of the Irish type of stair is found at St Patrick’s in the fifteenth-century belfry tower on the north of the nave.

12 For the Franciscan friaries see Gwynn and Hadcock, op. cit., pp. 235-39, and Meehan, C. P., The Rise and Fall of the Irish Franciscan Monastery (Dublin; Duffy, 4th edn, 1872)Google Scholar.

13 There are numerous general books on Irish country houses: two well-illustrated picture books are Desmond Guinness and Ryan, William, Irish houses & castles (London; Thames & Hudson, 1971)Google Scholar, and O’Brien, Jacqueline and Guinness, Desmond, Great Irish Houses and Castles (London; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992)Google Scholar. Brett, C. E. B., Buildings of County Antrim (Belfast; Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, 1996)Google Scholar includes many small but typical lesser country houses and Ulster farmhouses, for one county.

14 Gwynn and Hadcock, op. cit., p. 12.

15 For a representative selection of Irish main doors see de Breffney and ffolliot, op. cit., pp. 206, 207.

16 For an illuminating analysis of the sources which inform Gandon’s work see McParland, Edward, James Gandon, Vitruvius Hibernicus (London; A. Zwemmer, 1985)Google Scholar.

17 For these houses see A. Rowan, ‘Georgian Casdes in Ireland’, Irish Georgian Society Bulletin, January-March 1964.

18 These Picturesque casdes are catalogued in McParland, E. and A., and Rowan, A. M., The Architecture of Richard Morrison and William Vitruvius Morrison (Dublin; The Irish Architectural Archive, 1989)Google Scholar.

19 I have discussed the story of Irish nineteenth-century church design at greater length in ‘Irish Victorian Churches: Denominational Distinctions’, in Ireland, Art into History, edited by Kennedy, Brian P. and Gillespie, Raymond (Dublin; Town House Press, 1994), pp. 207-30Google Scholar.

20 An important study of court houses in one part of Ireland is provided by Brett, C. E. B., Court Houses & Market Houses of the Province of Ulster (Belfast; Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, 1973)Google Scholar.

21 For this see Sheehy, Jeanne, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past, The Celtic Revival (London; Thames & Hudson, 1980)Google Scholar, and Larmour, Paul, Celtic Decoration (Dublin; Eason’s Irish Heritage Series, 1981)Google Scholar.