Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie
Help Keep Boards Alive. Support us by going ad free today. See here: https://subscriptions.boards.ie/

Charleville Castle

  • 01-11-2006 01:29PM
    #1
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,247 ✭✭✭✭


    Ok so i'd normally stick something like this in the "Ghosts in the News" thread but its just too important for that:

    CharlevilleTimes.jpg

    There was an article (to follow) in the Home supliment of the Irish Times on Sunday about the danger that Charleville Castle is in due to the plans to build a bypass through grounds.

    I'll post up the article later.

    Anyway I'm planning on organising an Investigation for the new year at the Castle in the hope of putting a bit of money there way - details to follow.


Comments

  • Subscribers Posts: 19,421 ✭✭✭✭Oryx


    I saw this on Sunday, and meant to bring it up here! So 6th are you the paranormal ambulance man or is that someone else?


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,247 ✭✭✭✭6th


    oh thats Ian from PRAI.

    I'm already planning a few things to try raise money, nothting that will amke a difference but sure its worth the effort.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 606 ✭✭✭malico


    Well I've never been called that before!


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,247 ✭✭✭✭6th


    haha, well I presume thats you they make reference to in the Sunday Times?


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 606 ✭✭✭malico


    Not read it! Post it up!


  • Advertisement
  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,369 ✭✭✭✭Zillah


    Is there a gathering card for when an old poster suddenly returns out of the blue?


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,633 ✭✭✭stormkeeper


    Count me in for the investigation 6th. I'll even stay a few days extra in Ireland.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 117 ✭✭hot chick




  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,247 ✭✭✭✭6th


    Cheers Hot Chick, I couldnt find it. Anyway I'll just post it here because they move them after a while.
    Ireland: Grim spectre
    One of Ireland’s most haunted castles is threatened — not by ghouls but by a bypass plan, writes Dara Flynn
    Charleville Forest Castle is said to be one of the most haunted in the country, but its guardians, Dudley Stewart and Bonnie Vance, aren’t remotely afraid.

    For them, there’s nothing frightening about Harriet, the little girl who fell to her death from a stairwell centuries ago but still makes regular cameo appearances. Nor is there anything particularly scary about the two young gentlemen in period garb who haunt its east and west towers, nor the cloudy figures of Lord Tullamore and Lady Emily, who take regular turns of its 45,000 sq ft.

    For Stewart, an engineer, and Vance, a New Yorker who took on the castle 18 years ago, it’s a sinister threat in the future, not the past, that raises the hairs on the backs of their necks.

    When Offaly county council announced its intention to dissect the castle demesne with part of the Tullamore bypass, the couple embarked on a complex legal exorcism that still haunts them more than four years on.

    “When the route was announced, we knew we couldn’t stand back and do nothing — it was so ridiculous,” says Stewart, the castle’s managing trustee.

    Most of Ireland’s ancient demesnes have been ill-fated and sliced, divided and redistributed for redevelopment and infrastructure in booming Ireland. The Charleville Forest demesne is one of the last remaining “intact” demesnes, but it would lose this claim were the local authority’s planned route to get the green light.

    The bypass would cut through the lands of the demesne directly in front of the castle, effectively separating the historic building from its 2,800-acre park — the largest of its kind in Europe.

    The couple objected, but were unsuccessful, and were forced to take a legal route. For now, movement is suspended on the case for another three years. Stewart and Vance’s main challenge is that they do not own the land on which the castle stands. Vance is the long-term leaseholder of the building alone. The land is owned by the Charleville Estate Company.

    Their opposition to the development is based on their conviction that the demesne should be protected as a single — if vast — unit incorporating both castle and lands.

    A Heritage Council conservation report last year declared Charleville Forest to be of international cultural and natural importance. It is also protected by the Charter of Venice, although this depends on the building remaining intact. The Department of Education estimates the average castle loses €300,000 a year, and even well-restored buildings can revert to wrecks without continuously funded supervision and attention.

    “We’re attempting to bring life to the building, to use it just as it was when it was built. That’s an opposing force to being crippled by the cost of it, going bust and letting it fall into decay. If it decays, its protected status is threatened and could be removed,” says Stewart.

    “Opposing the plan puts us in a precarious position. If we lose, we risk losing the castle building, too.”

    The pair say their decision has affected the financial support the castle needs to thrive.

    The restoration and maintenance was initially aided, in part, by a handful of corporate sponsors, but now Charleville’s guardians have been forced to become increasingly autonomous in their activities. When the state deemed it too expensive to take on, Vance and Stewart could have buckled under the financial strain.

    Instead they upped their game and called on an army of Irish and foreign volunteers to keep the castle breathing and redeveloping its heritage trust. Groups can use the castle for a variety of projects, with access provided through a membership system. Today, Charleville has 24 autonomous groups, or 256 volunteers, and more than 1,000 members or friends of Charleville. The groups are involved with arts and crafts, health and safety, sustainability, general restoration, plasterwork, gardening, multi- media, festivals promotion and catering.

    One includes a team of emergency medical technicians-cum-amateur ghostbusters, who take glee in charting Charleville’s spooky goings-on in their free time.

    “They have about €6,000 worth of equipment, including infra-red devices, for detecting ghosts. And then they turn up with their ambulances and do a great job at our festivals,” says Vance.

    Hosting festivals is a tried and tested fundraising method for Ireland’s big houses and has proved hugely successful at Slane Castle, Kinnitty Castle and Stradbally House.

    Last summer the Castlepalooza music festival took place in the grounds, involving 120 volunteers. “We’ve had 14 festivals here in six years. They’ve been extremely smoothly run, all by volunteers,” says Stewart.

    Charleville regularly plays host to unfamiliar rather than mainstream acts, including a variety of continental performers and experimental musicians and artists. Events held there have included the MorFest, the Belgian experimantal group Noisemaker’s Fifes, and last year, an audio-visual installation attempting to show how plants interact with humans.

    It also hosts the Phoenix Festival, which commemorates the day in 1785 when the Earl of Charleville accidentally set the mainly thatched Tullamore town alight with a hot-air balloon during his 21st birthday party. “The town burnt down, but somehow the soldiers managed to save the pub,” says Vance.

    Since about 1996, the castle has also been the home of Quest, a learning campus, which has allegiances with American, French, British and Muslim universities, from where students travel to work on research projects. Their fees help fund the restoration.

    Charleville also earns some of its keep as the setting for lavish television productions, having been featured on Living TV’s Most Haunted, Fox TV’s Scariest Places on Earth and Haunted Hotels and Castles. Various student productions and ghost fiction dramas are shot there.

    Next, it will represent a spooky- looking Northanger Abbey in a BBC adaptation, as well as featuring in two films: The Tudors and Becoming Jane, based on the life of Jane Austen.

    In 1798 the castle was commissioned by Charles William Bury and building began in gothic-revival style by the Frances Johnston school (designers of the GPO in Dublin). It was completed in 1812 and as well as its striking gothic looks, it features a warren of crawl-space corridors and secret passages that reflect the fears of the earl at the height of the Irish rebellion.

    Vance first discovered Charleville Forest Castle in 1969, on a visit with her late mother, Constance. She finally took over from Michael McMullen, its then lease-holder, in 1988. Having cut her teeth in restoration alongside her mother, who renovated period houses in America, Vance and a small staff set about repairing the gothic treasure.

    “We stripped and sanded floors, tackled the wainscoting and removed layers and layers of all different colours of paint from the walls and plasterwork its previous leaseholder had applied — McMullen was a very colourful character,” says Vance.

    The shedding of layers of paint from the gallery ceiling revealed the artistry of William Morris, known as the pioneer of interior design. Charleville’s rooms are also noted for the presence of fan-vaulting, a weightier gothic form of ceiling vaulting where the plasterwork resembles a fan.

    Of the castle’s 89 or so rooms, all of the formal rooms have been at least partially restored, including the dining room, library, gallery, music room, boudoir and part of the basement as well as 10 bedrooms.

    With the bulldozers on stand-by until at least 2009, life goes on at Charleville, as do the dead.

    “Any great building is haunted. Even Einstein wrote about the supernatural. We’re used to it now, and it’s become a fun thing for many people,” says Stewart.


Advertisement