Valerie Pakenham: The big house in Ireland

Cassell

$99.95


"Everywhere desolation and pretension," wrote Virginia Woolf in 1934, after staying with Elizabeth Bowen at Bowen's Court. Bowen once defined owning a Big House in Ireland as something between a predicament and a raison d'etre.
The Pakenhams live in one of the great country houses which have haunted the Irish landscape and imagination for 400 years. (Pakenham Hall is famous for the being the first house to get central heating in the early 1800s.) Many now stand empty, their owners having fled the insuperable challenges of upkeep, yet their histories remain to be told.
This large-format book is an anthology of writings by people who have owned, stayed in or worked in these sprawling piles. The dire chill, smell and darkness of stone rooms in the era before electricity or decent plumbing are evoked, but so is the romanticism of fairytale-like homes.