Harristown House is an Irish country house, constructed in either 1662, 1740 or the 1780s, and is named after the townland in which it sits near the village of Brannockstown, County Kildare, Ireland, on the banks of the River Liffey. Following a fire in 1891, the house was rebuilt to a smaller design by architect James Franklin Fuller, with the original third storey removed.
As of , the house acts as a language school/summer camp and occasional filming location and venue for hire.
Harristown Castle The townland of Harristown, on the edge of the Pale, was originally the site of a castle owned by the Eustace family since at least the 1470s, which in 1650 was besieged during the Irish Confederate Wars and "taken by a party of the parliamentarian forces under Colonels Hewson and Reynolds." The castle later came into the ownership of the Chetwood family. An ornamental canal (a popular feature of country estate houses in the late 1600s) and formal garden existed in the vicinity of the castle.
An account of the castle and ornamental canal, under the ownership of the Chetwoods, was recorded by a visitor to Harristown in 1748: (It was) a large dwelling with a noble court before it, that bore the face of venerable antiquity (but yet no decay appeared in any part of its form). The situation is on the summit of an hill (sic), and the front looks down from an high (sic) eminence into the River Liffey; but what charmed us beyond imagination was a vast body of water, in an artificial bed of a large extent, where we saw a ship completely furnished, as if ready to make a long voyage by sea; her sails spread, her colours flying, anchors weighed, guns firing, and the sailors neatly dressed, everyone in their proper function, with their usual sea terms. In a neat pleasure-boat we were conveyed on board...
This artificial canal was stocked with carp and tench "whose taste equal(ed) those of Hampton Court" according to the visitor. The "ruins of Harristown Castle and artificial waterway" are listed on the Record of Protected Structures for County Kildare.
According to the National Monuments Service, the castle was "largely thrown down for building materials" in 1884, and as of 1902 only "a very small fragment" of it remained. In 1912, the castle was described as "now demolished" but in 2012, it was noted that a 1-metre-high section of wall remained standing onsite.
The footprint of where the castle once stood is located some 1.5km to the north east of where the modern Harristown House would eventually be built.
Construction of Harristown House Some sources claim that Sir Maurice Eustace built the present-day house in 1662. It is known that the demesne's private seven-arch bridge, which crosses the River Liffey 340m to the south of the house "probably dates from the second half of the 17th-century" according to an assessment by the National Monuments Service.
In 1681, Eustace obtained a charter from King Charles II "constituting his estates (at Harristown) a manor, with power to hold courts leet and baron (and) to hold a market and two fairs at Carnallaway", a nearby townland. When Eustace died in 1704 with no male heir, the estate was inherited by his three daughters and divided into three parts - Harristown, Mullacash and Carnalway, with Eustace's eldest daughter Anne inheriting Harristown.
Through Anne, the Harristown estate passed to her son Eustace Chetwood, who then sold it to James FitzGerald, 1st Duke of Leinster, whose son William (2nd Duke of Leinster) eventually resold it to the La Touches in 1768.
A village design statement (VDS) produced by Kildare County Council for Brannockstown village in 2009 noted that the "Harristown Estate was built in 1740 as the county seat of the well established La Touche family", however the La Touches didn't buy the estate until 1768.
A map dating from 1752 depicts the village of Brannockstown (spelt 'Brenockstown') as a network of small roads and houses with a larger house to the north, which the VDS recognised as possibly representing the Harristown demesne. Taylor and Skinner's Maps of the Roads of Ireland published in 1783 shows a large country house with linear trees to the east of Brannockstown village (most likely Sallymount House), whereas to the north lay a second large house on the opposite side of the River Liffey described as 'Woodbank' which may possibly have also indicated the Harristown demesne.
According to oral histories collected by local schoolchildren in the 1930s from elderly Harristown residents as part of the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection project, Catholic priests, who had been outlawed from practicing Catholicism during the penal times, celebrated Mass in secret at Harristown House. These laws which had existed from the 1600s, began to be repealed from 1771 onwards. It was not specified why or how they came to use Harristown House for this function.
La Touche ownership La Touche family background The La Touches, or Latouches, were a prominent Huguenot family, who had first arrived in Ireland as refugees from France after the Edict of Nantes (1598), initially working in textiles and poplin manufacture before moving into banking, and then politics. As the historian Arthur Aspinall noted, "Every Irish parliament in the reign of George III included a Latouche and at the Union (in 1800) there were five."
In 1753, David La Touche the Second (1703-1785), a successful banker, bought land at Ballydonagh, County Wicklow, upon which he constructed a large house from 1754-1756 which he named Bellevue.
1768 purchase of Harristown estate Approximately twelve years after the completion of Bellevue, in 1768, David La Touche II purchased the Harristown estate from the Eustace family (whose head had been Lord Portlester). A turn of the century article in the Journal of the County Kildare Archaeological Society, however, put the date of this purchase at about 1783. La Touche II did not take up residence at Harristown upon buying the property.
Upon the death of David La Touche II in 1785, his son John David La Touche (1732–1810) inherited the estate at Harristown, as well as a £7,000 a year income, and did take up residence. According to the website Historic Houses of Ireland, it was John David La Touche who commissioned the construction of Harristown House at this stage (the mid-1780s), however his entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography makes no such reference, only to various improvements he made upon the estate: John La Touche set about improving Harristown from c.1785; he walled his demesne, built a new bridge, and secured an act of parliament to change the route of the Naas to Dunlavin road. He also resided at town houses on Merrion Square and Ely Place, Dublin.
Improvements to estate Historian Thomas Sadleir, writing in 1912, noted that John David La Touche had "built a fine mansion at Harristown, and greatly improved the demesne" giving credence to the concept that it may have been built during his tenure. Irish architectural historian Edward McParland notes that Whitmore Davis, the architect of the initial three-storey iteration of Harristown House, was "much patronized by the La Touche family for whom he built Harristown House in Co. Kildare and who engaged him to build the Female Orphan House in Dublin (in 1792)". Little much else is known of Davis, but in 1789 it appears he "advertised in the newspapers his intention to publish engravings of some Irish country houses", although nothing ultimately came of this project.
The About Us section of the Harristown House official website maintains that the house was constructed after the La Touche purchase of 1768, noting: "Harristown demesne was purchased by the La Touche family in 1768 and a spacious Georgian mansion was erected by Whitmore Davis in a dominant position overlooking the River Liffey." According to a 2016 Irish Times article: The house itself was reoriented at some point, as was the trend, to face away from the river and towards the avenue. Its imposing nine-bay façade with Ionic portico opens into a very grand double-sized reception with 5m ceilings, oak parquet floors, marble columns and a wood carved fireplace.
The enclosing of the estate by a boundary wall in the 1780s necessitated the deviating of the route of the original Naas to Dunlavin turnpike road, which until that point had passed right in front of the house, crossing the Liffey by the old 1600s bridge. This rerouting of the main road to outside the perimeter of the demesne required the construction of a new bridge downriver, which was completed in 1788 and cost La Touche "upwards of £1,000" to construct. A plaque installed on the bridge that year to commemorate its construction is still in place as of .
The bridge was named the New Bridge on account of its having replaced the older one, and is still known locally as such, but is also known as the La Touche bridge, or Carnalway bridge and forms part of the modern R412 road. La Touche re-routed the road by power of an Act of the Irish Parliament.
Later 18th century Paintings of John La Touche and his wife Gertrude FitzGerald (daughter of Robert Uniacke Fitzgerald), as painted by the Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman remained hanging on the walls of Harristown House as of 1912. Young describes the pair being "attired in fancy dress, and must have been painted soon after their marriage (in 1763) (which) show them to be a goodlooking pair of young people".
During the 1798 Rebellion, a battle was fought at Nineteen-mile-house in the adjoining parish of Carnalway, between a party of United Irishmen and a detachment of British cavalry. A more substantial engagement took place in the churchyard of nearby Old Kilcullen on 24 May 1798 during the Battle of Kilcullen, in which 22 Crown forces were killed, including two captains named Cooke and Erskine. Many of the rebel United Irishmen who took part in the battle were subsequently massacred a few days later at the Gibbet Rath executions while attempting to surrender. A tablet was later installed at Carnalway church in memory of the deceased captain, Charles Cooke, sculpted by Charles Regnart.
The Acts of Union in 1800 changed the political landscape of Ireland forever, and the borough constituency of Harristown was disenfranchised. £15,000 compensation was paid to its patron on account of its disenfranchisement.
From its purchase in 1768, descendants of the La Touche family would continue to occupy Harristown uninterrupted until 1921.
St Patrick's church, Carnalway
During the tenure of John David La Touche, around the year 1798, he built a church named St Patrick's to function as a Church of Ireland church for Harristown estate. In his A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland in 1837, Samuel Lewis made the following observations about the church: The church, a very neat edifice with a tower and spire, was built by the late John La Touche, Esq. and contains a tablet to the memory of Capt. Cooke, who fell while charging the insurgents at Kilcullen bridge, in 1798. The late Board of First Fruits granted £100, in 1810, towards the erection of a glebe-house, attached to which are 10 acres of glebe.
Following an 1891 redesign, the tower from the 1798 church is the only part of the original building remaining.
19th century Thomas Rawson, in his 1807 Statistical Survey of the County of Kildare, assessed the trees planted on the estate: At Harristown, near Kilcullen, that very great improver John La Touche, Esq. has formed within a few years most magnificent and extensive plantations; he has adopted very much the plan of grouping each kind by itself, which prevents their injuring each other, as they invariably do, when planted promiscuously; in group plantations, if executed with taste, you have an immediate dotted carpet of various hues.