altinaghree Castle, Longloand Road, Donemana, Strabane BT82 0PN

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

The remains of a symmetrical three-storey three-bay castellated country house with gate lodge and remains of walled garden, built c.1865 and located on the north side of Longland Road, to the east of Donemana village. Rectangular on plan with four-storey tower and remains of a return to north; porte-cochere to east.

Roof is gone, but was formerly concealed behind a castellated parapet. Walling is locally sourced rock-faced coursed schist with sandstone dressings; there is a string course at parapet level and all corners are clasped by slightly projecting piers rising above parapet level and detailed with arrow and musket loops; all dressings are stone. Variety of mullioned-and-transomed window openings, generally segmental headed to ground floor and square-headed to upper floors except where otherwise stated; most have label mouldings and stone sills. No glazing remains.

South garden front is symmetrical and five openings wide, rising to a four-storey tower above the central openings which are flanked by lesene strips rising above parapet level to form tower pinnacles. Openings are as stated, with the exception of the central bay, which has oriels on corbelled base to second and fourth floors; that to fourth floor has only the base remaining; that to second floor has a decorative interlacing stone parapet detailed with quatrefoil apertures.

West elevation is detailed as before but three windows wide with oriel to second floor and roundel to raised central section. There is a central segmental-headed door opening with bull-nosed stone step. This elevation is extended at left by the remains of a two-storey return (see later).

North elevation is abutted by the remains of the return at right and the four-storey tower is located in the re-entrant angle. At centre is a central depressed pointed-arched stairwell window opening with perpendicular tracery, rising almost the height of the building and lighting three flights of stairs. Remainder of windows are irregularly arranged and there is a pointed-arched-headed door opening with hood-mould to left of stairwell window and to tower. Tower has a roundel date stone (partially illegible, but with date?1860?). The return has only two walls remaining and has square-headed windows with label-moulds and chamfered surrounds.

East entrance front is three windows wide, symmetrically arranged about the central porte-cochere, which is roofless and has a depressed pointed-arched opening to each cheek and a pointed arched rebated opening to east face flanked by lancet niches. Ground floor windows are segmental-headed and mullions have slender colonettes; first floor has an oriel as before to either side, and a central slender Venetian-style window supported on stone colonettes; second floor has a bi-partite round-headed window opening with central colonnette.

The house is set in open farmland on an elevated site with commanding views over the surrounding countryside. To south is a small levelled area, now grassed, and contained by a stone retaining wall. The house was formerly accessed from east by a winding track (now open pasture), marked by a stone gatelodge and screen. Both are constructed of rock-faced sandstone, as the main house; the entrance screen is castellated and has a mock machicolation frieze over a Tudor-arched coach-arch; the reveal is ashlar stone with vermiculated springing stones. The screen is flanked by a tower at right and a two-storey lodge at left. The lodge has a shallow pitched corrugated metal roof and a square-headed window with label-mould at each floor to east and west elevations (remains of metal framed windows); it is linked to the screen by a two-storey entrance bay with pointed-arched headed door opening at each side surmounted by a blank stone cartouche. The demesne is bounded by a stone boundary wall, and contains no features with the exception of the remains of a walled garden to east of the house; the walls are of brick (stretcher bond) and contain several camber-headed niches, also having a single remaining elliptical-arched entrance opening to north side.

Roof: Missing
Walling: Rock-faced regular coursed schist, sandstone dressings
Windows: Variety of mullioned and transomed, no glazing
RWG: Missing

Historical information

Altinaghree Castle was built in the early 1860s and abandoned in the late 1880s. However, despite its very brief life, it was associated with two significant figures in natural history and lives on in the folk memory of the area.

A house first appears on the site on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1853, captioned ‘Liscloon House’. By the third edition, this has been replaced by a different structure, captioned ‘Altinaghree Castle’, surrounded by a wall. ‘Liscloon Cottages’ and a ‘Lodge’ are also shown nearby. On the fourth edition the castle is shown in ruins.

Griffith’s Valuation (1856-64) lists a ‘house, offices and land’, with buildings initially valued at £62, and eventually reduced to £14. The reduction appears to be due to separating off farm, outbuildings and cottages from the main house. Buildings listed include stables, a garden house, stalling house, granary, cow house, steaming house and piggery. The house is owned by William Ogilby in fee.

In 1861, Annual Revisions note, ‘This house is throwing down. Mr Ogilby is building a very fine new house, value when completed’. A further note reads, ‘Value new house in 1864’. The house has been valued by 1865 at £190 and is listed as a house, offices, gate lodge, land and plantation.

William Ogilby was a London barrister and distinguished naturalist, the author of numerous papers and at least one book in his field. He was a Fellow of the Geological and Zoological Societies of London and Dublin and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He held the position of honorary secretary of the Zoological Society in London from 1839 to 1846, at which time he settled in Ireland, following the death of his father. His publications included, ‘The Natural History of Monkeys, Lemurs and Opossums’, ‘Observations on the history and classification of the marsupial quadrupeds of New Holland’, ‘Observations on the structure and relations of the presumed marsupial remains from the Stonesfield oolite’, ‘On the character and description of a new genus of carnivore called cynictis’. He was well known to Charles Darwin, and served with him on a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science charged with drawing up rules for standardising zoological nomenclature. He was a member of the scientific elite of his day and it is likely that he took part in early discussions about the significance of fossils in the lead up to the publication of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” in 1859. (Desmond, p.314, Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1847-50, 1860, p.215, p.437)

Following his return to Ireland, Ogilby married Adelaide Charlotte Douglas, daughter of the Rev. Charles Douglas of Earls Gift (HB10/09/002) in 1851. He died in 1873, not long after completing Altinaghree Castle and it then passed to his son Claude William Leslie Ogilby who is listed as the occupier in 1876. Claude also married a Douglas, Bessie Henrietta, daughter of Captain William Grant Douglas, in 1875.

However, from 1888 when the house is listed as ‘vacant’ and leased from the Trustees of Claude W Ogilby, the building deteriorates and decreases in value. The first reduction is to £78, then to £70 in 1889, when the house is first described as a castle. In 1892 it is described as ‘dilapidated’ and the value is reduced to £5. Samuel Eaton becomes the lessor in 1905. A note of 1909 reads, ‘floors and windows gone, a ruin’ and in 1910 it is deleted from the record altogether, athough the gate lodge continues to be occupied.

The Strabane Weekly News of 4th January 1975 reports on some of the local stories surrounding the castle, which was “built entirely of Irish cut stone and surrounded by a wall of the same type. The stones were brought by horse and cart from Dungiven, Co. Londonderry. Stonecutters from the Barons Court Estate were employed at the castle. Masons were paid one shilling per days and labourers, 10d”. According to the Natural Stone Database, the stones used are local Dalriadan schist and Barony Glen sandstone. When finished, “its banquet room was said to be unequalled throughout Tyrone”. Ogilby was known locally simply as a successful farmer and proprietor who entertained on a lavish scale, bringing in cooks from Belfast and Dublin for his banquets, although it is not clear whether it is the older or the younger Ogilby that is remembered in this way. “In the possession of the present owner, Mr S.A.C. Eaton…is an invitation card [dated December 12 1872] requesting his grandfather and his wife to [attend] a dinner party”. Dinner was to be served at 3pm.

The Ogilby’s second son, James is remembered locally as falling in love with a factory girl that he met when returning from a hunt meeting at Dunnamanagh. Folk memory has it that, following his family’s opposition to their marriage, James vanished from the area in 1875. However, he returned seven years later in 1882 to marry his sweetheart, who had waited for him. Although James was known in Tyrone to be a scholar, it appears not to be lesser known that he went on to follow in his naturalist father’s footsteps and, having emigrated to Australia, became regarded as one of the foremost experts in his field. He published many books and papers, mostly on Australian fish, such as ‘Notes on some fishes new to the Australian fauna’ (1889) and ‘Edible fishes and crustaceans of New South Wales’ (1893). He held posts at the Royal Aquarium New South Wales, the Australian Museum and the Queensland Museum and gave his name to several species of fish. He was highly regarded by colleagues, who commented, for example, “Not until the late James Douglas Ogilby finally located at Brisbane did the study of Queensland fishes really reach its present perfected state.” (Proceedings of the Pacific Science Congress 1930, p.180)

The older son, Claude, died at the early age of 43, but apparently left the house six years before his death. The fact that his affairs were in the hands of trustees suggests that he was bankrupt. A contemporary newspaper article implies that the upkeep of a large castle had perhaps proved overwhelming, following Gladstone’s land reforms. (Strabane Weekly News, January 4th 1975, Marquis of Ruvigny, p.237)

Hugh Dixon writes that the castle “would have been regarded as wildly unfashionable by many contemporaries. It looks more like the sort of castellated factory which Pugin derides than the naturally planned, colourfully designed country houses then in vogue under Ruskin’s influence. It is no surprise to me that it had a very short active life – dinner at 3pm was definitely a very late hangover from Georgian times” (Hugh Dixon, notes dated 2 Jan 1987)

Jeremy Williams writes that “the architect responsible is unrecorded, but there are many parallels with the Londonderry Apprentice Boys’ Hall of 1873 by J. G. Ferguson before bomb damage—the same segmental mullioned windows and shallow oriels, Ferguson is more admired today for his industrial architecture, and, despite its appellation, Altnachree is more castellated mill than castle. It is referred to as a castle for the first time in 1872, a year before Claud William Ogilvy’s inheritance at the age of twenty-three. Entered through a porte-cochere on the side along the axis of the central corridor, with the three main rooms strung out along the garden front. Main staircase set into triple-arched composition, but taking up the minimum of space, all like an office block. Four-storied towers in the centre of each front; three floors elsewhere. Claude William Ogilvy is recorded in one edition of Burke’s Landed Gentry, just after he had completed [but see above] the vast castellated pile which he thronged with guests until they were displaced by creditors.… Unclaimed, his castle disintegrated. Today only a shell surveys a denuded park. Crisply observed in Pevsner to be better as a ruin.” (Williams, p.353-354)

References:

Primary Sources

1. PRONI OS/6/6/3/2 – Second Edition OS Map (1853)
2. PRONI OS/6/6/3/3 – Third Edition OS Map (1905)
3. PRONI OS/6/6/3/4 – Fourth Edition OS Map (1951)
4. PRONI VAL/2/B/6/42B – Griffith’s Valuation (1856-64)
5. PRONI VAL/12/B/42/6A-F – Annual Revision Records (1860-1924)

Secondary Sources:
1. Darwin, C, Burkhardt, F, Brown, J., Smith, S., “The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: 1860”, 1993
2. Darwin, C, Burkhardt, F, Smith, S., “The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: 1847-1850”, 1985
3. Desmond, A.J., “The Politics of Evolution: morphology, medicine and reform in radical London”, 1992
4. Dixon, Hugh. Notes. (2 Jan 1987) Dunnamanagh Castle Historic Monument File NIEA.
5. “The Romantic Legends Linked with Ruined Castles at Donemana” Strabane Weekly News, 4 January 1975
6. Marquis of Ruvigny; Staff, R. “The Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal”, 2001
Proceedings of the Pacific Science Congress, 1930.
7. Williams, Jeremy. “Architecture in Ireland, 1837-1921: A Companion Guide.” Dublin: Irish Academic Press Ltd, 1994.
8. www.stonedatabase.com

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

Altinaghree Castle is a ruinous mid- Victorian castellated house, located in open countryside on an elevated site to the east of Donemana village. The house is a picturesque if bleak ruin, dominating the landscape around, and remaining a distinctive local landmark. The exterior form of the house is generally intact, featuring some well-crafted masonry detailing and certainly constitutes a late example of the symmetrical castle style. The most impressive feature is the grand stone staircase lit by a soaring perpendicular window, however, almost no interior detailing remains and as the building is roofless it cannot be considered for listing. The immediate setting is rather exposed and featureless, with the exception of vestiges of a walled garden. The house is of historic interest as the residence of noted naturalist and contemporary of Charles Darwin, William Ogilby, and his son James.