Minding the Manor

How are Ireland's old noble houses seeding their future? At Ballyfin Demesne, it glimmers in the forests, parklands, gardens, and a way of life that goes back centuries

Irish trees are gifted storytellers, perhaps as much so as their countrymen. It's the sense you get walking the woodlands west of Dublin in County Laois (pronounced leesh), the way the beech trunks bend and twist into alphabet letter shapes, leaning into footpaths to whisper a story.

If the trees could talk inside the walled estate of Ballyfin Demesne, they might marvel at the story of a 10-year-old boy who became the equivalent of a billionaire overnight. It was two centuries ago, and when this boy-Sir Charles Coote, a descendant of the first earl of Mountrath-grew into his bank account, he bought the land where this forest of raconteurs is rooted and built a grand country house on it. Oh, and what a show that was, with Pompeian tiles and Belgian fireplaces and a Roman sarcophagus shipped back from his Grand Tour adventures. "Cost what it may!" echoed across the grassy meadows, while behind the house, the finest gardens came alive with fruit trees and vegetables and flowers to fill the residence. Sir Charles's wife, Lady Caroline, got herself an aviary for her peacocks and doves, plus a beauty of an orangery with curved glass walls and space for all her exotic plants.

And then the century turned and the wars chased everyone away. When a Catholic boarding school moved in, the schoolboys created a new leisure class, playing handball in the old grapery, ducking behind the stables for a smoke. After the turn of another century, the children disappeared and a rescue of the house commenced: top-to-bottom repairs, a slow slog over nine years. But when it was finished, the grand limestone house was grand again. It opened as a hotel, and soon the well-to-do were back. Some of the schoolboys too, returning to work on the very estate they whipped through as children.