The Walled Garden

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Walled garden lying to the south of the main house and its associated outbuildings, adjacent to the west side of the former back lane to the house. Only the northern half of the garden still survives, the southern portion having been sold and developed for housing in the 1990s. The garden in its original form was 2.48 ha extent, and the present surviving northern part is about 1.10 ha in area. This surviving northern part of the garden is of early 18th century date, and is probably earlier than the demolished southern part. It walls are of random rubble with no coping, the upper parts being partly covered in ivy and in poor condition. The garden interior is covered with tall grass, nettles and brambles, with trees lining the fringes. It contains the remains of a small glasshouse, brick entrance, and there is some 18th century brick incorporated in the wall on the west side.

Historical information

Specific
The walled garden at Prehen was divided into two separate areas and shown as unchanged in outline from the original 1832 Ordnance Survey Map. The garden was flanked on the north, west and south sides by woodland and the main glasshouse lay in the southern portion, facing due south. In the 1990s the southern garden area was sold and developed for housing but the older, original garden suirvives. It is shown on the second revision Ordnance Survey map of 1850s to have been regularly sub-divided with perimeter paths and cross paths in a fashion typical for walled garden layouts. There are no known photograpghs of this garden in production, but walled gardens were typically places of both utility and beauty and the paths in this garden were most likely flanked with flowers, perhaps also with box hedging, with espalier fruit trees hiding lines of vegetables within the main plots.

General
Prehen means ‘place of the crows’ and during the 17th century the banks of the River Foyle in this vicinity were still thickly wooded. The townland of Prehen, part of civil parish of Clondermot, and barony of Tirkeeran, was acquired as part of Goldsmith’s Proportion in 1614. Thomas Raven’s map of the Proportion, made in 1619, shows the townland clearly with a house located close to the water, south-west of the present mansion. This building, evidently a single storey gable-ended dwelling, occupied by one William Taylor, was undoubtably destroyed in the 1640 Rebellion. The property was acquired in 1664 by Alderman Alexander Tomkins and his wife Margaret, daughter of Alderman Thomas Moncreiffe. Tomkins was Mayor of the city at the time of the siege of Londonderry in 1689 and there is a memorial dedicated to ‘Tomkins of Prehen’ in Derry Cathedral erected in 1678. His house at Prehen, which was probably built in the 1660s, must have stood on the site of the present building. However, it may not have been a large affair, for although Tomkins is described as ‘of Prehen’, his main house was probably in the city itself. Whatever house stood here, it must have been badly damaged in 1690 when the more irregular troops of James II gutted houses in the vicinity of the city. Alderman Tomkins’s son George served as MP for the city from 1715-39 and apparently had a residence in Mobuy, Co. Londonderry.
On stylistic and architectural grounds we can deduce that the present house was built in the 1740s. It is therefore most likely to have been built by Colonel Andrew Knox, who in 1738 married Honaria, daughter and heiress of Andrew Tomkins of Prehen. Andrew Knox was descended from a Scot, the Rev, Andrew Knox, who was consecrated Bishop of Raphoe in 1610, and was granted the monastic lands of Rathmullan in 1614. On the death of his father George in 1741, Col. Knox inherited the family houses at both Rathmullan and Munnymore, Co. Donegal. It is likely that the income from this inheritance provided the financial stimulus to built the present house at Prehen.
While there is no documentary proof to support it, on stylistic grounds it seems very likely that he engaged the Londonderry architect Michael Priestly. There are similarities with Lifford Court House (1745), notably in the use of the parapet and Gibbs door surround and deep pediment. Another Priestly house, Porthall in Donegal, built for John Vaughan of Buncrana, also shares a number of features with Prehen.
The Lifford Court house was to witness the trial of ‘half hung’ John MacNaghten of Benvarden in December 1761. He was found guilty of murdering Mary Ann, the only daughter of Col. Andrew Knox and later executed. The event, which began with his perusal of the hand of Mary Ann Knox in 1759, followed by her attempted kidnapping and murder in a coach near Strabane, was a major and tragic event in the history of Prehen during the time of Col. Andrew Knox.
Col. Knox was to serve as MP for Donegal for 27 years. He was a religious man and made friends with the dissenter John Wesley (1703-91), who stayed at Prehen in the 1760s. In 1760 George Knox, son and heir of Col. Andrew Knox, and brother of the murdered Mary Ann, married Jane, daughter of Thomas Mahon of Strokestown House, Co. Roscommon. On the death of his father he succeeded to the Rathmullan and Moneymore properties in 1774 and later on the death of his mother in the 1790s he also inherited Prehen. He lived until 1840 and was responsible for creating the parkland around the house in the 1790s (now much reduced) and for building a gate lodge c.1820. The adjacent road alongside the Foyle here was laid down in 1795. The house and its parkland is depicted in a Brocas print c.1800 from the city of Londonderry.
Prehen was inherited by George Knox’s eldest son Andrew, who was Lieutenant in the Donegal Militia and for many years MP for County Donegal. He married Mary, daughter of Dominick McCausland of Drenagh and was in turn succeeded prematurely in 1848 at Prehen by his son George, then a minor (1832-1910). George had a successful military career, being Lieutenant-Colonel in the Derry Artillery and High Sheriff of County Donegal in 1862. He liked to travel around the world, collecting curios abroad, including a wife he found in Switzerland, Rose Virginie Grimm of Neuchatel. He died in November 1910, leaving no sons, and thus the male line of Knoxes at Prehen came to an end.
George Know had two daughters, one of whom married Ludwig Von Scheffler, Doctor of Philosophy at Weimar near Hamburg. They in turn had a son George, born 1884, who became a Page to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar and later Governor of the Royal pages at the Emperor’s Court in Berlin, where he was honoured with the title ‘Baron’. He inherited Prehen from his grandfather aged only 26, but a condition of the inheritance was that he add the name Know to his own for the term of his natural life, and that he become a British Citizen within two years of the testator’s death. The inheritance was contested in court, which Baron Scheffler won, and he subsequently settled in Prehen. Unfortunately, the Great War broke out in 1914 and Baron George Otto Louis Von Scheffler-Knox found himself declared an enemy alien and the house and lands of Prehen were requisitioned and placed on the open market under the Enemy Property Act (conveyance signed by Stephen Tallents, Custodian under the Enemy property Act). The Baron himself died in 1966.
During the early 20th century the house was subdivided into flats and the parkland suffered with trees being felled. Eventually, the house was acquired by in 1971 by Julia Peck, granddaughter of Winifred Knox, authoress of 25 historical novels and histories. The house, then in a poor state of repair, was restored by her and her parents Julian and Carola Peck, who moved here from Rathbeale hall, near Swords in 1974. Mr Peck died in 2001.

References:
Mss Map dated 1828 or 1829 by JL. Townlands of Currody, Bolies, Brickilns, Prehen.
Ordnance Survey Map Sheet 20 (1832)
Ordnance Survey Map Sheet 20 (1856)
PRONI D/2807
The Irish Society (1822) A Concise View of the Irish Society, p93.
PRONI MIC/26 Templemore Church of Ireland Register
The Registers of Derry Cathedral, Parish of Templemore, 1642-1703 (Parish Register Society of Dublin, 1910), p367.
Burke’s Landed Gentry (1846), p1404.
Pue’s Occurrences, 11th September 1739.
View of Foyle toward Prehen by Henry Brocas
Ordnance Survey Memoirs (1835)
Penelope FitzGerald (1977) The Knox Brothers. Macmillan, London
Bence-Jones, M (1978) Irish Country Houses, p235. Burkes, London
Rowan, Alistair 91979). North West Ulster, p405-6. Penguin, Harmondsworth
Dean, J. A. K (1994) The Gate Lodges of Ulster, p119. UAHS, Belfast
Mss Notes compiled by Colin Peck.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

B. Proportion
D. Plan Form
J. Setting
K. Group value

Criteria for listing: historic interest

X. Local Interest

Evaluation

Although half demolished, the surviving part of this garden constitures the original walled garden for the house and is of at least 1740s date, if not earlier. This is demonstrated by the form of bricks used in the wall on the west side.

General comments

Surviving 17th or early 18th century garden walls are relively uncommon in Northern Ireland, as so many were replaced or rebuilt in later periods. Most surviving Irish walled gardens belong to the post 1770 era.