Castle Freke by Robert O’Byrne, Published by the Irish Georgian Society Review (10th October, 2023)
Once a Sad Sight in the West Cork Countryside, Castle Freke has found a new and imaginative savior.
While traditional skills such as those pursued by stuccodores are still found in this country, their practitioners are rarely given an opportunity to display much initiative or imagination. As a rule, those who work in these fields are carrying out repairs on existing structures, repairing or replacing sections of an already known design scheme, rather than being able to create something entirely new. However, a rare instance of large-scale, free-hand plasterwork is currently underway at Castle Freke, County Cork. Located a few kilometres east of Rosscarbery and sitting on high ground with views across the Atlantic Ocean, the house dates from the 1780s, although what is now the basement appears to come from an earlier period. It replaced an earlier adjacent property, Rathbarry Castle, as seat of the Freke (later Evans-Freke) family. As first designed by an unknown architect (local man Michael Shanahan has been suggested) and commissioned by Sir John Evans Freke, later sixth Baron Carbery, Castle Freke was a large neo-classical building, somewhat dismissively described 1820 by John Preston Neale as being ‘in that plain modern style so much used in Ireland about 30 years ago, in which inward convenience was almost the only object attended to.’ By the early 19th century, the owner’s taste had changed and he employed Richard Morrison not just to design a new office wing but in addition proposed that ‘the whole thing might be thrown into the character of a Castle as more appropriate to the situation and circumstance of the place.’ While the offices were duly built with an abundance of crenellations, towers and turrets, Morrison’s plans for the house were not fully executed, nor those of his successors, siblings James and George Pain.
Eventually further work was carried out on the building, first in 1867 by Henry Hill and then in the 1890s by the latter’s nephew William Henry Hill. Disaster struck in 1910 when an accidental fire gutted the interior of the house, but it was rebuilt with reinforced concrete floors and completed by 1913 in time for a ball to be held there marking the coming-of-age of the tenth Lord Carbery. Unfortunately, he sold Castle Freke and its contents in 1921 and, after experiencing various vicissitudes, the place was entirely dismantled and left exposed to the elements in 1956.
Such might have remained the case to the present day, except that in 1999 Castle Freke was bought by Stephen Evans-Freke, a great-nephew of the tenth Baron and youngest son of the 11th. Following his acquisition and beginning 20 years ago in 2004, he embarked on a project to bring fresh life to the building and make it once more a family home. It would be a mistake to describe this venture as a restoration, because little other than the exterior walls and concrete floors survived on the site. The fire of 1910 had already wiped out the original Italianate interior decorative scheme and its replacement, in fashionable Edwardian style, only lasted a short period before being similarly lost. An opportunity therefore arose to start afresh and come up with an entirely new vision for the house’s rooms, one that respected the past but allowed it to be interpreted in a fresh fashion. While still a work in progress, the interiors of Castle Freke already act as a showpiece for contemporary Irish craftsmanship, thanks to a small team of stuccodores and other specialists who share their complementary skills on site: Kevin Holbrook and his son William, Stephen Tancock, Dolcie Ross-Keogh, Patrick Lalor, along with master stonemason Micheal O’Sullivan and master carpenter Glen Goddard. Closely liaising with each other and with their client, they have devised a range of different themes for each of the building’s principal spaces, the most traditional of which is the music room, located at the west end of the house and looking down towards the bay.
The perpendicular gothic ceiling here recalls not only St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle and Westminster Abbey’s Henry VII Chapel, but also 18th century Gothick interiors such as the gallery in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, Twickenham. The music room was the first to have a ceiling reinstated, and the work here might be deemed a test to see what was possible in the house, not least in terms of the abilities of the people responsible. Among the tasks undertaken by Kevin Holbrook at Castle Freke has been the creation of some 40 scagliola columns. Made to imitate solid marble but actually hollow, and therefore much lighter, scagliola became fashionable in 17th century Tuscany but has been little used in recent decades. Its creation involves blending gypsum, animal glue and water and then pouring the mix into a mould where pigment is added so that it solidifies to mimic the veins found in marble. Once dry, the surface of the scagliola is pumiced on eight successive occasions to produce a smooth surface, before being buffed with oil and beeswax to give it a high sheen. Working with his son William and longtime associate Patrick Lalor, Holbrook estimates that each of the Castle Freke columns, if the time involved were to be condensed, takes some four weeks to produce. A further challenge tackled by the team was the construction of a pair of double-helix columns. The idea for these came from Stephen Evans-Freke, a reference to his career in biotechnology, as well as to the DNA structure of all living things. Singly, these columns are known as Solomonic (or barley-sugar), their name derived from the legend that the originals of this design, now seen supporting the Baldacchino in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, came from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Widely used in baroque architecture, those in Castle Freke, each 3.85 high, are unusual in being paired, one column wrapping around the other and it was Stephen Tancock who worked out how to execute them in scagliola, something which to the team’s knowledge has never before
been attempted. Resting on substantial bases, the finished columns rise to capitals, their design deriving from carved stone examples in the 12th-Century Templar hermitage of San Bartolomé in north-central Spain. The double-helix columns are now installed between the windows of the ballroom. The ceiling above these extraordinary creations offers an opportunity to see the stuccodore’s creativity being given freer rein than is usually the case. A distinctive feature of the work being undertaken at Castle Freke is that, rather than drawing on classical themes – as would have been the case in the 18th century – the stuccowork in this instance draws on legends and traditions associated with the Evans-Freke family’s Norse, Welsh and Irish Celtic roots. The ceiling in the ballroom celebrates the legend of King Arthur, the centrepiece showing the Lady of the Lake rising from the water to hand the king his sword Excalibur. This scene is framed by a pair of giant winged dragons, the one Celtic and the other Anglo Saxon in style, their bodies coiling around the perimeter of the landscape as they engage in their own mortal combat. Each of the ballroom’s four corners contains one of the other key figures from the Arthurian myth, including Merlin, Guinevere, Lancelot and Mordred. Immediately adjacent to this room, and separated from it by a series of arched openings that feature paired Ionic scagliola columns, the saloon has an equally dramatic ceiling. This shows the Norse God Odin enthroned and flanked by two wolves, Geri and Freki: the Freke family were of Viking origin, their name deriving from Freki, meaning warrior or audacious in Old Norse. The saloon ceiling is an example of the building’s unexpectedly audacious decorative scheme. Dolcie Ross-Keogh, another of the core team members, comments on how fortunate they are to work with a client who encourages them to take the initiative and allows them the freedom to be creative.
As members of the team have moved from one room to the next, their skills – and their confidence – have grown. Typically, after close consultation with the client, maquettes are prepared of each ceiling, so that the design can be agreed before work begins. But since so much of the plasterwork is not pre-formed in moulds but instead applied free-hand, further modification are always possible during the painstaking course of each ceiling’s creation. In the staircase hall, below a deep-relief stucco ceiling that tells the story of the Children of Lir and their transformation into swans, a deep frieze is filled with a joyous celebration of nature. Eight different varieties of flowers, and an equal miscellany of leaves and their stems, intertwine and tumble over each other, and while much of the frieze is a repeat pattern, no section is the same as the next because through it all numerous insects, birds and animals have been randomly introduced, as well as an occasional unexpected figure, such as a rotund mole holding a martini glass (suspected to be a playful reference to their client’s well-known fondness for this evening tipple).
Given the position of the frieze, high above the remarkable floating staircase designed by Stephen Tancock, much of this meticulous detail will not be seen by visitors to Castle Freke, although at a number of points the steps graze against the hall’s outer walls (where the structure is secured by concealed steel joists) allowing closer inspection of the work. Sadly, this is not the case when examining the drawing room’s coved ceiling, where only the central figure of Cliodna, Celtic Goddess of the Sea, was cast. She stands on a Nautilus shell (representative of the Golden Ratio), while her figure complies with the ideals of Vitruvian man. The local landscape, including the Galley Head Lighthouse outside Rosscarbery, can be seen behind the goddess, while fantastical birds fly overhead and imaginary ocean creatures hover around the periphery of the scene, together with coiling tendrils of seaweed. The frieze below the room’s cornice is given over to a menagerie of grotesque creatures, inspired by those seen in the Vatican’s Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena painted by Raphael and his team in 1516-17.
The work at Castle Freke is breathing fresh life into an ancient craft, and ensuring that the artistry of the stuccodore continues to be practised in this country. However, although the skills involved may be traditional, the finished result is not. It would have been too easy to copy or mimic the stuccowork designs produced in Ireland during the 18th century. In this instance, thanks to a happy meeting of minds between client and artisans, and a shared willingness to take risks, an exhilarating alternative is coming into being.
Robert O’Byrne is a writer and lecturer specialising in fine and decorative arts.
