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Knockfane

KNOCKFANE WAS SITED, not on the hill that was Knock Fane itself, but at some distance from it and almost in a hollow. It was as though it was on its hunkers, crouching there, unruffled, like a hen on her nest. The name derived from the Irish, ‘Cnoc Finn’ or ‘Fionn’, meaning the white or fair hill and there were several theories as to why the gentle incline to the east of the house, which was hardly even a hill, should ever have been thought of as white or fair. Possibly it was because the sun at the solstice would have illuminated its cap in a particular way or perhaps it was because it had, of yore, been planted with the white of the May, the hawthorn that was sacred to the ancient Irish. Such suggestions were variously stated as absolute facts but Old Esdaile was never exercised by such conjecture. To him Knockfane was Knockfane was Knockfane. It was where he and the Esdailes belonged and it was where they had belonged for a very long time. More to the point, Knockfane was where the Esdailes – if Willis Esdaile had his way – would remain.

An Esdaile, a younger son of a family who were not even of the yeomanry in their native Leicestershire, first came into the area in the late seventeenth century. Seeking adventure as one of a militia dispatched to subdue the native Irish, this Esdaile stayed on, as others did too, when his company returned to England. He found himself in the townland of Knockfane and in 1710 he took a lease on 600 acres ‘for three lives’ – as was the custom of the time – from the Earl of Mulhussey at a yearly rent of £165, 12 shillings. The name was spelled ‘Esdayle’ in the lease and Robert was described as ‘of Knockfane’ but the house was not built until 1721. That was the date carved on a stone set into the wall above the back door. Beneath it were two sets of entwined initials, ‘RE’ and ‘MS’. There was no mystery about this inscription: it recorded that Robert Esdaile was the builder of the house and that Mary Sale was his wife.

That stone, being at the rear rather than positioned prominently on the façade, served to alert the unwary that there was much about Knockfane that was not entirely as it seemed. Unusually for an Irish country house, it faced south. This was because the place was back to front, or rather front to back; and lest there be any doubt about the matter, another stone above the hall door was inscribed with a different date and different pairs of initials. The year was 1818 and the knotted letters were ‘HE’ and ‘FW’. What had happened was that ‘HE’ and ‘FW’ had, in 1818, built an entirely new house and tacked it on to the back of the old one. The Knockfane which emerged from this rebuilding was long and low, two storeys high with gracious rooms and an impressive staircase hall; and, even though further building took place some decades later, the appearance of the house remained largely unchanged down to Willis and Annette’s time.

Even to a casual observer it would have been clear that ‘HE’ and ‘FW’ must have thought of themselves as persons of some consequence. ‘HE’ was Hugh Esdaile, the great-great-grandson of Robert; and, not unnaturally, ‘FW’ was his wife. She was always referred to as ‘Forty-Thousand-Pound-Flora’ in the family as that was the extent of the dowry she brought to the marriage; and it was some of that money that was spent on the rebuilding of Knockfane. Flora Willis was her name and, when Hugh married her in 1815, it was the nearest any Esdaile ever came to bringing an heiress into the family. Flora also brought her name with her and, from that time on, until the birth of Edward, the eldest Esdaile son at Knockfane was always christened, Willis.

The countryside around Knockfane was flat as far as the eye could see. Athcloon, 12 miles away, was officially the county town but it was an ugly place and made uglier by the cement works which spewed dust and smoke from a huge chimney six days a week. The local town, Liscarrig, with the remnants of the Norman tower house of the De Poers on the main street (where it now housed Skelly’s butcher’s shop) was, by comparison, an enchantment. It was there that the Esdailes went to church and it was there that, as little children, they first went to school. There in Liscarrig, they guarded their secrets: their money in the Ulster Bank; their wills and deeds in the strongboxes of generations of Holts the solicitors; and their health and well-being in the care of Dr Knox, first the father, then the son.

Knockfane was 4 miles east of Liscarrig, out past the new cemetery, then right at O’Hara’s Cross, and down there a couple of miles. The house itself was not visible from the road and the avenue, which ran through a lower field before reaching the Lawn field in front of the house, was long.

A white-painted iron paling, sufficiently spaced as to leave a generous sweep of gravel and grass enough for a croquet lawn, fenced the house and protected it from the attentions of the cattle which always grazed the Lawn Field. Near the house, a conglomeration of cypresses, the Monterey cypress that is called, in Ireland ‘Donard Gold’, faced down the avenue. As high as the house, they caused the driveway to swerve and blocked all sight of the farmyard which lay beyond.

An area to the left of the house, facing south and west and, therefore, very sheltered, was in mown grass with a sundial in the centre of a square and a high stone wall at the rear: a wicket gate in an arched opening provided a glimpse of the flower garden – always referred to as the pleasure garden – which bloomed beyond. A giant magnolia grandiflora, planted for its protection close to the house, now concealed most of the east wall. It was matched by a huge weeping ash, spaced further away from the house to the west. On the facade of the house, a climbing rose – Albertine – held sway: Annette had planted it her first winter at Knockfane. Almost wanton in its wafery profusion, it scented the drawing room and tumbled up almost to the roof, threatening the bedroom windows as it did so.

As to the house, Flora’s £40,000, or the portion of it that was spent on the building of Knockfane, did not stretch to anything unnecessarily fancy. The Esdailes, in spite of Hugh’s ambition in marrying Flora, were plain people and a plain house is all that they required. No cut-stone façade, no niches or balustrades, no pediment or any other finery was imposed upon the structure. The windows to the drawing room and the dining room, on either side of the hall door, were lofty and, in reaching almost to the ground, were undeniably elegant; but that had not been the intention. The builder, as could be deduced from an examination of the stonework, had made a mistake. Even the hall door, normally a feature of Irish houses, was undistinguished, although its fanlight could be said to be remarkable. A cumbersome pattern of wrought-iron flowers – the species was indeterminable – had been fashioned into a large semi-circle as a fulsome tribute to Flora.

The isolation of the house, at the end of a very long avenue, caused some visitors to fear the possibility that in Knockfane there might be something sinister; but the easy-going graciousness of the place soon allayed any anxieties in that respect; and if the ghosts of centuries past walked there, it was generally agreed that they did so with a friendly benevolence. Willis’s father, when he married Granny, had added an annex, a jumble of rooms as offices for grooms and bedrooms for maids in the area where the old house joined the new and if Knockfane had any secrets, that was where they lurked.

Knockfane’s most salient feature, and the one which always caused speculation and debate, was its staircase.

‘It’s a flying staircase’, Willis would say, as his father and grandfather before him had also done. If a visitor protested that, as all staircases had flights of steps, they might all be said to fly, Willis ignored them. Arising out of the fact that the earlier hall door at Knockfane and Flora’s new one were aligned, Knockfane had a single wide hall which extended from the front of the house to the rear. The staircase marked the halfway point and, like the hall it was made up of a combination of the earlier staircase and the new one. Sets of steps, two sets to the front, two sets to the rear, rose to meet at a small half-landing from where they sprung, or rather flew, up to two top landings (one front, one rear), off which opened the bedrooms.

‘There’s not another house in Ireland with a staircase like it,’ Willis would say. When he was a child, the wood of the handrail and balusters was stained and grained as oak with an effect so ponderous as to make flight seem very unlikely. But when Annette came to Knockfane she had the hall wallpapered and the stairs painted a cream colour, creating a much lighter effect.

Willis slept at the front of the house in the big bedroom above the drawing room. It had the luxury of a dressing room attached, and it was here that the children, Edward and Julia, had their cots when they were babies, in order to be near their mother. There had in generations past, been times when Knockfane’s six bedrooms had scarcely been sufficient – Hugh and Flora had nine children, although only six of them survived. Then there were other periods when most of the rooms had not been used at all. Willis’s father had been an only child and during his time, Knockfane had been an empty lonely place, but with Edward and Julia and Lydia there, this was no longer the case. They each had a bedroom off the half landing and in the years following Annette’s death, when there was a housekeeper who was also expected to be a nanny, she occupied the fourth room there. It was the least attractive, with a small window that looked out north across the dormer roofs of the annex. The window to Edward’s room was almost obscured by the magnolia tree and on more than one occasion when he was still quite small, he climbed out the window and down the tree in order to terrify and alarm the housekeeper. When the last housekeeper left and was replaced by a local woman, Mrs Rooney, who came on a daily basis and did not live in, Edward moved to the housekeeper’s room, saying he could no longer sleep with the noise of the starlings in the tree. Thereafter, even after he moved to Derrymahon, that remained his room and he always slept there on visits home.

The house retained the memory of Annette but, just as her life had been cut short, so too had the improvements she had intended to make to the place so that there was a poignancy about the cheerfulness of the hall and staircase, the master bedroom, and the drawing room which had all been decorated in her style. The other rooms, in stark contrast, retained the atmosphere of half-a-century earlier and the dark memory of Granny Esdaile.

‘Mama had this room painted before I was born,’ Willis would say and, even though the room in question – be it the morning room or the dining room – was so old-fashioned that it seemed almost modern and the memory of his mother was hardly pleasant, there would be a note of pride in his voice.