Black Lake (9 page)

A couple of days before the move, Mr. Murphy had found him here. He knocked before coming in and seating himself opposite.

“Could I have a quick word?” He always behaved like a houseguest who worried that he was overstaying his welcome, rather than the person who was in charge of the estate now. “Mr. Foyle and I were wondering whether you’d be willing to write a history of Dulough?” He paused. “For the visitors. We’ll be handing out a brochure on the first day. I’m going to ask your wife if she’ll write something about the gardens, too, so that they’ll know what’s what.”

John smiled. He’d thought that perhaps he was going to have his study taken away from him after all.

Before he could answer, Murphy added, “Foyle wanted to write it himself, but I talked him out of it. I want the insider’s take. It doesn’t have to be too long.” Murphy got up to leave, the chair creaking beneath him. “The thing is to give the visitors something to get their teeth into.” He rested his hand on the doorknob for a couple of seconds. “A good story. The sort of thing they’d want to hear about a place like this.”

John had spent much of the week since the move wondering what Michael had meant by that. He knew the bare bones of the family’s history—and there were Olivia Campbell’s diaries from the eighteen hundreds: copious, often sentimental, writings about life on the estate, nothing to whet the appetites of tourists eager for a slice of colonial intrigue.

How did one begin something like this? How could he make people interested in Dulough?
Du-lough: Du, a corruption of the Irish word
dubh,
black, and
lough,
lake. The estate is called Dulough, or, in English, Black Lake, because of the depth of the water which filled this glaciated valley after the last ice age.

Dulough was built between 1854 and 1857 by Philip Campbell
. No, that was the way one expected a thing like this to begin. He needed to think of something more attention-grabbing:
In 1854, a tyrannical, rich Scottish landowner by the name of Philip Campbell…
Was it in his interest to call his own ancestor tyrannical?

Philip and Olivia Campbell arrived in Ireland in the spring of 1852, not long after the Famine, when the frost was beginning to thaw in the cold, unforgiving valley of Dulough. Philip was looking to expand his vast Scottish holdings and he had heard that the barren land of north Donegal, which looked so much like his own country, was going cheap.

The Campbells had already spent a month visiting the milder climes of Wicklow, Wexford, and Kerry. Olivia found Wicklow particularly beautiful and legend has it that she tried to persuade her husband to buy there. But he was determined on his bargain, and they came north—in April, when the southern counties are experiencing spring showers but Donegal has not yet shed the pall of winter.

Campbell wanted a vast tract of land, a piece that would both complement and rival his Scottish estates. It was a local priest who suggested Dulough; its steep valley and bottomless lake were just what the gentleman was looking for. The priest’s motives were altruistic; he had watched his flock suffer through the Famine and knew that in order for Campbell to establish his grand estate, he would need to buy out several small struggling families who could make nothing of the rocky soil and would be much better off living somewhere else.

The three families who owned their land jumped at Campbell’s offer, but the priest had forgotten to mention that there were at least five who rented and that he would inherit them as tenants. Once the deal was done, Campbell contracted his cousin, Charles Wrenn-Harris, an architect from Edinburgh, to draw up plans for a house. He also, in the autumn of 1854, set about evicting the remaining tenant families from his land, claiming that their rent was in arrears. A local reporter described Campbell’s men removing the families and their possessions from their cottages and nailing the front doors shut (later that morning a rudimentary battering ram would make them uninhabitable). But of course nothing could be done. Ireland was still a part of the British Empire; the law did not favour the destitute.

The ruins of those cottages and the ridges where the families had grown potatoes—without much luck—were visible in the foothills of the valley. There was one family left in town, the O’Callaghans, whose ancestors had been evicted. John’s father had begun to lease them a couple of Dulough’s better fields at far below market value when he took over the estate. John had stopped charging them rent altogether when his turn came. When his accountant asked about it, he couldn’t bring himself to tell the truth, claiming that the land went unused. When he saw the O’Callaghans in town he avoided them, as he imagined they did him. Murphy would find out about the arrangement soon enough and put a stop to it, no doubt.

Once Campbell had rid himself of his tenants, he began work on the house in earnest. He chose a naturally flat promontory on the lake, with excellent views of the valley and, in the distance, the sea. To his cousin, Campbell gave obsessive instructions: The house must be grand enough to impress any friends he and Olivia might invite to stay with them, but not so grand as to offend his Presbyterian sensibility. This delicate balance consumed Campbell and Wrenn-Harris as they drew and redrew the plans. Finally a house that was elegantly in keeping with the stark beauty of the valley, but devoid of any luxuries, was born. Visitors may be interested to note that all the bathrooms are without mirrors and instead have windows above the basins, so that the bather may worship God’s beauty rather than their own.

And yet, though my ancestor planned meticulously, he was seized by a stab of conscience during the building of the house. Much to his cousin’s dismay, he halted construction before Dulough was complete; the ballroom on the third floor went unfinished. His cousin felt that Campbell’s decision was a mutilation of his design, and the two were never to speak again.

The house was not the sole building erected by Campbell. In tandem, the chapel on the island was built. Thousands of years ago, a part of the demesne collapsed into the sea, leaving an island that is now less than a mile square. Campbell very much liked the idea that it would take physical hardship for his family to worship, that they would have to walk out over the sand to the island or, when the tide was in, take a boat. The chapel was spared no expense; though there were never more than a few congregants, it was equipped for up to a hundred. The design, both inside and out, is quite traditionally Gothic, but simplified for Philip’s tastes. He and Olivia are buried there, as is every family member since. We regret that the island will not be open to visitors.

When he was satisfied with the house, Campbell set about designing the gardens. Here he could do as he liked, as he could be sure that the more exotic his planting was, the more pleased his God would be. (Please see my wife’s guide for a more detailed description of the grounds.)

In 1863, when the gardens were still in their infancy, Philip Campbell took ill. Though his illness went undiagnosed at the time, his symptoms suggest a cancer of the respiratory system. He died quickly, and by autumn Olivia Campbell was mistress of Dulough.

Olivia was a thoroughly different character to her late husband and set about modifying the estate to her own tastes. I have no doubt that, had she been able to find them, she would have restored the evicted families to their homes. At forty, she was still a comparatively young woman and, rather surprisingly, she was not intimidated by the estate’s isolation. After selling off much of her husband’s land in Scotland, she made Dulough her home. Photographs from the years after his death show elaborate picnics in the gardens and parties in the swimming bath by the lake. She became a patroness of the arts, using her wealth to establish scholarships in the local secondary school, as well as inviting both British and Irish artists to stay and work at Dulough.

But Olivia enjoyed the friendship of one artist in particular, Geoffrey Roe, who bought the guesthouse at Lough Power, where the Campbells had stayed all those years before. His great-grandson, the well-known sculptor Edward Steele, lives at Lough Power today.

Though Olivia is keen to point out in her diaries that she never attended Roe’s parties, she did come to know him well. He was a great contrast to her first husband: Where Philip was religious, Roe was a known atheist, widely reported to have left London after a string of soured affairs. Where Philip took pride in denying the self, Roe was famous for doing just as he pleased. He is very often in her writings, easel set towards the sea, troubling some servant or other for a jar of water for his brushes, or a rag, or a gin and tonic.

Once, in a London gallery, John had seen a painting by Geoffrey Roe tucked into an exhibition entitled Water Women. There, between two of Bonnard’s paintings of Marthe in the bath, was a picture called
C. Bathes.
It was significantly less accomplished than Bonnard’s, and Roe would never have been shown alongside such a master had his subject matter not fit the theme of the exhibition. The perspective of
C. Bathes
was from the woman’s head; the face itself wasn’t visible, the body almost submerged. It was modest compared to the paintings surrounding it. The date and location were listed as unknown, but John recognized the bathroom as Dulough’s, and knew instantly that the “C” stood for Olivia Campbell.

The Campbells had just one child, Duncan, a solicitor in Edinburgh. Olivia bought an apartment in the New Town and visited him regularly, but after one such visit, she wrote in her diary that she was ‘always happy to return to Dulough’ (3
 
June 1878) and that she feared that, after her death, her son would ‘neglect the house and gardens, leaving them in the hands of some caretaker or other, never bothering to visit himself’(5
 
November 1880). She eventually chose to leave the estate to my great-grandfather Thomas Harvey, her sister’s child, adding the stipulation that their first son must be christened Philip and that the owner of the house must always be named Campbell.

Olivia died in 1910. Unlike her husband, she was much mourned by the local community. Thomas Harvey arrived the following year from England with his wife, Sarah, to take over the running of Dulough. They brought my grandmother Caroline with them. She was ten. Though Olivia indicated that her diaries were to be burnt, the Harveys found them a great handbook to the workings of the estate; there were notes on the house’s quirks, how to treat particular blights in the gardens, how to go about pruning a rhododendron, which butcher to trust—and which of the regular guests had outstayed their welcome.

My grandmother Caroline was twenty-two when the Civil War exploded in Ireland. The IRA were roaming the country, torching the big houses of the Anglo-Irish. Dulough was an obvious target because of my ancestor’s cruelty to the tenant farmers so soon after the Famine. At that time, Caroline wrote:

‘I woke suddenly this morning. It was still dark & I had a feeling that something was different—or not quite right. I put my dressing-gown on & went out into the hall. It was silent; I couldn’t hear the wind anymore. There was a creak on the stairs & before I had time to be afraid, I saw Daddy disappearing into his study. I knocked on the open door. His gun rested against the desk, the barrel pointing up to the ceiling. It was the first time I’d seen it out of the locked cabinet in the hall. “Caroline, you understand what’s happening, that Ireland is in great trouble at the moment?” I told him that I understood it very well & that the English should get out and leave us to our own devices. My father smiled and said, “Unfortunately our position is not quite that simple, although I agree that Ireland should be left to its own devices, as you put it.” I waited for him to elaborate, but instead, he turned and looked out the window.’

In this extract, we can see that my great-grandfather felt the threat to Dulough was very real indeed. And yet the Irish Republican Army didn’t burn the house as they had burnt so many others (perhaps we were simply too far north). But, a few months later, a group of local men, claiming to be the local faction of the IRA, marched down the avenue and up to the front door. They knocked politely and informed the housekeeper that they would be taking over Dulough ‘as long as it served the needs of the Irish people.’ The housekeeper informed them that they would not, and that she recognised more than a few of them. This tactic was successful in diminishing the invasion but not in stopping it completely, and a small group of young men who would have been much more at home in the fields than fighting for the needs of the Irish people used the dining room as a Center of Operations for a few months in the winter of 1922/3. The occupation ended when the family became tired of eating in the kitchen, and when my grandmother formed a strong friendship with a quiet local boy, my great-grandfather informed them that Dulough had more than played its part in the fight for independence
.

For a time, Dulough was silent again after the IRA occupation. My grandmother missed the boyish IRA contingent terribly. So she was thrilled when she won a scholarship to Trinity College in Dublin to read Physics, a very unusual subject for women to study then. Upon graduation, she married my grandfather George Monk, of Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, the son of close family friends. The price he paid for the estate was his name. He promptly became ‘George Campbell’, at least on paper.