Couple spends lockdown making an Irish country house

(CNN) – As starter homes go, a three-story Georgian mansion on an 820-acre estate isn’t bad.

When Neil Watt and his partner Kris Reid moved to the top floor of the Castle Ward mansion in Northern Ireland in March 2020, it was their first home together as a couple.

Watt had gotten a new live-in job as collections and house manager at the property of the British heritage institution The National Trust, and they were preparing, along with a large team of colleagues and volunteers, to welcome the daily crowd of visitors.

In addition to the 18th-century house and landscaped gardens, people come to see the Victorian sawmill and flour mill, the shoreline where seals sometimes harbor, and the 16th-century tower house better known as Winterfell in HBO’s “Game of Thrones”.

Then, of course, the pandemic happened. The mighty doors of the mansion had to be closed, the public turned away.

This corner of County Down, where the Ward family lived from the 1570s to the 1950s, became – de facto – a private home again.

And as new lords of the mansion, Watt and Reid decided to give it a makeover.

Lords of the manor

Castle Ward is the Janus of manors with two faces.

Approached from the landscaped gardens and it is an 18th century mansion in the classic Palladian style. But walk around the corner to where the pointed windows and battlements look out on Strangford Lough, and it’s Georgian Gothic.

This bold fusion of styles splits this building of more than 40 rooms in the center, inside and out.

“Whenever this house was built, it would have been one of the largest in Ireland,” said Neil Watt, Castle Ward’s collection and house manager. “And certainly in times of style and architecture it was the most avant-garde.”

Like many of us when we were locked in our homes last spring, the couple turned to chores around the house first.

In their case, this involved tasks such as scrubbing hundreds of pots and pans, dismantling Victorian chandeliers and cleaning them one by one, and cleaning and cataloging about 2,000 antique books.

‘We want this house to shine’

“We just kept telling ourselves: when we can open again, whenever that may be, we want this house to shine,” says Watt.

Both men are experienced conservationists – Reid is currently studying for a PhD in Heritage – so restoration work isn’t new to them.

What was unusual, however, was how much time they could spend on renovations while normally dealing with visitors.

A new dehumidification system was installed, carpets and rugs knocked down, floors waxed, and silver and brass polished, from fireplaces to door knockers.

And when colleagues and volunteers were allowed to return in the summer, they rolled up their sleeves and also got stuck. “As a charity, we’re nothing without people,” says Watt.

“We’ve done a lot of tasks that are really labor intensive, but it was very conscious to do and gave us something to work towards,” says Watt.

Royal connections

In addition to the conservation work, Watt used the lockdown period to further research the estate’s history and rethink how it was presented to the public.

“Fresh blood is so important,” says Watt, “because sometimes we tell stories because it’s been told before.”

Castle Ward was built in the early 1760s by Bernard Ward, 1st Viscount Bangor, and his wife Lady Ann, a descendant of the Stuart royal family.

The couple had traveled the world extensively and together they built their ambitious, modern home.

Watt’s doctorate is about women from the Irish mansion and Lady Ann’s story is one that he particularly enjoyed.

“She showed an independence of mind that may not have seemed at the time,” he says. She was rich, aristocratic and “she really did what she wanted.”

She was very sexually liberated, “he adds.” Before she married Bernard, she had a (many years) love affair with a woman, Letitia Bushe. ”

‘Family madness’

Lady Ann, her brother Lord Darnley and her son Nicholas were all accused by their peers of being subject to a “family madness”. It is not clear whether this was due to what we may recognize today as mental illness, or simply that their behavior was contrary to the social norms of the time.

One of the more lurid claims about Darnley, whose Berkeley Square house in London was Annabel’s legendary nightclub until 2018, was that he thought he was a teapot and feared sexual congresses otherwise his spout would come off at night fall.

Bernard and Anne’s eldest son, Nicholas, was a British Member of Parliament but was eventually declared insane. The estate would later pass to his cousin, after the intervention, Watt says, of the “very enterprising brothers of the 2nd Viscount of Bangor who thought the Viscount would be better in their hands.”

It was also rumored that his brothers had loosened Castle Ward’s railing to hasten their brother’s end, but Nicholas lived to an old age and these vain gossip is unfounded.

‘Open and honest’

“History is revisionism; history is discourse,” says Watt, who used the time in lockdown to create a new home story on tours.

This revisionism is part of a broader trend in the National Trust, which sparked controversy last fall by releasing a report on its properties’ links to colonialism and historic slavery.

John Orna-Ornstein, the trust’s director of culture and engagement, told CNN in September, “Our role is to be as open and honest as possible, to tell the full history of the places and collections we care about.”

Today, the island of Ireland is divided into the Republic of Ireland, an independent country, and Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK. However, before the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), the island was under British rule.

The big house’

The “big house” was a powerful symbol of the British establishment in Ireland, and these big homes of elite families were sometimes targeted during the 20th century periods of civil unrest known as “the trouble”.

While there are relatively few “big houses” left, especially in the Republic, “not as many houses were burned down as people think during the unrest of the 1920s,” Watt says.

The cost of upkeep in the 20th century, when the days of huge households with many servants were over, meant that “many more were simply torn down”.

While those kept in private families often fell into disrepair, “Castle Ward was really lucky because it was given to the nation,” Watt says.

‘We really turned the corner’

“The big house was just part of a larger structure,” he explains. “All these great houses were attached to an estate, like their sister homes in England, Wales and Scotland. In those places there was a society and there were many interconnections.”

Watt regularly receives letters from people whose ancestors worked at Castle Ward’s estate.

And while the legacy of the ‘big house’ has at times been a politically sensitive topic in Northern Ireland, Watt says, ‘I think we’ve really turned the corner. I think people are starting to appreciate these places as the shared spaces that they were. ”

While Castle Ward was able to open for part of 2020, it has now closed again indefinitely as part of the latest UK and Ireland lockdowns.

Watt says that while it was new to walk through the big empty rooms in the beginning, “by the second weekend you really want to open the doors and let people in. I think it really shows how important people are to historical place.”

Both men are from Northern Ireland – Watt is from County Tyrone, while Reid is from the nearby town of Ballynahinch – but due to the restrictions they hardly saw their families this year.

But says Watt, they love to look out from the top floor of the house’s Gothic facade, over the waters of the lake, where boats sail and people walk and horseback ride along the shores.

In the evening looking out to Portaferry, the town across the lake, ‘you never feel alone,’ says Watt. “The lights twinkle every night.”