Local history: talk on villas and lodges of Westport
WESTPORT Civic Trust will host their final lecture on Tuesday, April 26, at 8 p.m. in the Walnut Room, Plaza Hotel.
Patrick Duffy will speak about the villas and lodges of Westport - house names, field names and landscape history.
A notable feature of the Westport neighbourhood is the number of named houses to be seen. This is common enough around many landlord towns but Westport has an abundance of them, especially on the southern shore of Clew Bay.
Most of these houses are sufficiently important to be included in the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage. They are also recorded in 19th Century Ordnance Survey maps showing tree-lined avenues and ornamental gardens which mirrored the Big House environment of Westport House.
The houses were classified as 1st and 2nd class in 19th Century censuses. The community which inhabited these houses also mimicked Big House society or were associated with life in Westport House and demesne. Land agents of the Brownes, Marquesses of Sligo, occupied Cherry Cottage, Summerville, Altamont Villa, etc. This was a privileged Anglophone landscape on the scenic shores of Clew Bay, presided over by majestic Croagh Patrick.
In contrast to these elite landscapes of architect-designed, slated houses were the landscapes of small tenant farmers inland from Clew Bay. Their houses in 19th Century censuses and photographs were universally thatched, where the Congested Districts Board (CDB) reported on harsh living conditions and poverty in diet, dress and dwellings.
Houses here were mostly 3rd class three-roomed cottages in a landscape which was being striped into fields after the Famine by the landlord, the CDB or the Land Commission.
These houses had no names but their fields were named, half of them in Irish in outlying townlands where it was still being spoken in the 1800s.
The illustrated talk will do a traverse from the centre of Westport through Westport Quay into the surrounding townlands. All are welcome to attend - free to Civic Trust members, otherwise €5.
Patrick Duffy, formerly professor in geography at Maynooth University, lives in Westport. He is the author of books on Irish landscape (including Landscapes of south Ulster; Gaelic Ireland: Land, Lordship and Settlement; Exploring the history and heritage of Irish landscape).