The early years of the twentieth century, up to the start of the First World War, is the last great period of country house building on these islands.  Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) was one of the period's most noted architects, his designs reflecting the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement.  At the age of twenty, Lutyens met the forty-six year old garden designer, Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), with whom he collaborated on many projects.

Heywood was an interesting project as there was already a significant eighteenth-century garden, in the romantic tradition, on the site.  The first reference to the estate is in 1763.  By 1773 Michael Frederick Trench had built a new house overlooking the steeply falling ground with woodlands and a string of lakes, created at the bottom of the valley by the construction of three dams.  Placed around the estate are a number of follies, a sham ruin made up of architectural fragments salvaged from the nearby fourteenth-century Aghaboe Friary, a sham castle and a Gothic orangery.  A castellated gate served as the main entrance to the estate.  The first edition six inch Ordnance Survey map (1839) shows the estate in all its picturesque glory.

Trench's great grand-daughter Mary Adelaide married, in 1886, Lieutenant Colonel William Hutchinson Poë.  In 1906 they commissioned Lutyens and Jekyll to design a new garden.  This was built immediately around the old house, in a number of compartments, creating a series of almost secret gardens.  To the south, the steeply sloping ground was cut back to create a terrace with a central lawn flanked by herbaceous borders, supported by a high, heavily buttressed, stone wall, overlooking the earlier landscape.

Moving east, an alley of pleached lime trees leads to an oval sunken Italianate garden, tiered down to an oval pool with central fountain, guarded by stone turtles.  A loggia is sited at its eastern end.  A yew garden provided an alternative route, stepping down from the east end of the house.

To the west, a pergola of Ionic columns and oak beams hangs almost directly over the lakes.  Each compartment has its own very particular atmosphere, from intimacy to great open expansive views.

The house was destroyed by fire in 1950 but happily the garden survived and was maintained by the Salesian Fathers until it was taken into state care by the Office of Public Works and reopened to the public in 1994.

All of the records pertaining to the gardens at Heywood may be accessed by entering <Heywood> in the Name/Street search field in the NIAH Laois County Survey.

William Cumming NIAH

All original photography by Patrick Donald from the NIAH publication An Introduction to the Architectural Heritage of County Laois.