Heywood – how do you describe somewhere like that?  How can you possibly explain about the different colours, the beauty of it?  How can you tell that you’ve been there so many times but it was only yesterday you noticed the ferns?  How can I not have noticed the ferns before.

The cyclamen popping through the ground, the rose bushes in flower, the swans, the ducks, the goldfish in the pond, the red berries on the bushes.  The trees, the water, the ups and downs of all the hills

Some people talk about how they hate the winter but I went to Heywood yesterday and all I saw was colour, so much colour, at the same time so much bareness but so beautiful.

How can you show people these things?  I had two cameras *but* I had Bambi on a lead and hyper dogs and cameras do not go well together.  I got fed up of holding the lead when she tried to play I’m going to steal your stick with Maggie, only then once loose she changed her mind about the stick ‘ducks’ are much more fun and she tried to hang herself using a stick that was on the ground.  Now, don’t ask me to explain how a dog can try to hang itself with a stick on the ground, I can just assure you that she made a very good attempt.

How Do you cut 120 photographs back down to 30?  With difficulty – I still have 40 in my folder and I don’t know if I will have it in me to reduce them any farther.  If I took out the swan, the flower, the fish photos, yes that would bring the numbers down but then I miss some of the beauty I saw yesterday. The goldfish are in the pond in the enclosed garden

Heywood House belonged to a man called Frederick Trench. Frederick trained as a lawyer but he had a great interest in architecture.  He was friendly with members of the Neoclassical Movement such as James Gandon who may have helped to design the original Heywood House.  Frederick was involved in the design of the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin.

He build the house with a view over rolling hills towards Ballinakill.  He created a Romantic landscape with extensive planting of trees, a chain of artificial lakes,  a Gothic Gate Lodge and several follies. He also had an orangery (for growing oranges)

He called the House and the Estate, ‘Heywood’ after his wife’s mother.  In later years he wrote “My attachment to it has nearly been fatal to me, the sum expended in buildings and ornamental improvements has been upward of 45,000 pounds.

The grotto to the Virgin Mary was built by the Salesian order who used Heywood House as a Seminary between 1941 and 1950.

The obelisk combined 2 functions on the estate, it was a milestone with distances to Ballinakill, Dublin and Heywood.  It was also a memorial to Frederick Trench’s friend Andrew Caldwell.

The Sham Castle and the Gothic Ruin are ‘follies’ which were fashionable on estates throughout the country.  The Trench family used to entertain their friends here and they had views over the estate.  The window seems to be an authentic medieval structure and is believed to have come from Aghaboe Abbey.

To the east of the house was an alley of pleached lime & elm trees.  Pleaching means planting a row of trees and bending  and weaving the branches together to form a wall.

In the 1900’s Colonel Hutchenson Poe hired Sir Edward Lutyens to create formal gardens around Heywood House.  These gardens are the best example of Lutyens work in Ireland, the small interlocked formal garden is by Lutyens.

Dr. Jane Lyons, From-Ireland.net