Rescuing an Irish gem

This large and splendid book is more in the nature of a grand illustrated guidebook than a historical monograph. Hundreds of
photographs cover every aspect of Abbeyleix today, the magnificent Georgian house 60 miles south-west of Dublin — its contents, the garden and demesne, not to mention the owner’s family and friends. It makes a fascinating insight into the revival of the Irish country house in recent decades, as bankers, lawyers and entrepreneurs have taken on Irish estates and shaken them out of their 20th-
century slumberous (or violent) decline.

William Laffan has produced a well written overview of one of the more spectacular contemporary resurrections. Abbeyleix is of a considerable interest in its own right, as the work of James Wyatt, while the romantic wooded demesne, with carpets of bluebells, is a survival of the ancient forest which once covered the flat Irish midlands.

Occupying the site of a medieval monastery, Abbeyleix was a characteristic achievement of an Anglo-Irish Ascendancy family in Ireland’s golden period in the second half of the 18th century — the Age of Grattan.