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Here we reach the first myth: that Bagenalstown was to be Ireland’s answer to the French enlightenment, a major new town called either Versailles or New Versailles.\u00a0 The only source for this is A tour through Ireland in several Entertaining letters<\/em> (1746): ‘The next Place worth Observation was Bagenal’s-Town<\/em>, laid out by WALTER BAGNAL [1671-1745], Esq\u2026.who once intended to erect one of the finest Towns in this Kingdom or in any of its neighbours by the name of Versailles<\/em>‘.\u00a0 Bagenal’s efforts were thwarted when the main road was diverted away from his town, putting ‘a Stop to the further Progress of the Buildings after immense Expence’ [1].\u00a0 But could it really have been a new Versailles?\u00a0 A grid of five streets-by-four hardly suggests so: more likely a case of inflated ascendancy ego.\u00a0 Philip Henry Bagenal (1850-1927), writing in 1925 about his family’s history, criticised what he saw as ‘the somewhat ridiculous allusion to Versailles in the [1746] sketch’ [2].\u00a0 And yet the legend has endured, and nine out of ten books or websites will take as fact the anonymous and good-humoured remarks of the ‘two English Gentlemen’ who dined with Bagenal and his ‘several beautiful Children’ at their Dunleckny home about a mile north of the town, sometime in the 1720s, and left us this tall tale [3].<\/p>\n Apart from the grid layout, what had Bagenal actually achieved?\u00a0 Here again our only source is the English Gentlemen, quoted \u2013 and misquoted \u2013 ever since.\u00a0 My 1748 copy says Bagenal put up a ‘magnificent Square, Court-House, and several other public Buildings\u2026with Stones of different Kinds intermixed with Marble’ [4].\u00a0 Here we stumble upon the first reference to the town’s ne plus ultra<\/em> oddity: its courthouse.\u00a0 Where is it?\u00a0 You could easily pass it by, or at least miss its best fa\u00e7ade.\u00a0 Some directions: walk towards the river, then veer right onto Main Street, and soon it will appear, shunning the street, turning its back on the ordered rhythms of Bagenal’s “Versailles”: sullen, hidden, and obscure.\u00a0 You get the most fleeting glimpse of its Ionic portico from the small gaps on either side of its unpromising street fa\u00e7ade.\u00a0 These gaps serve to set it apart from the fabric of the town.\u00a0 It seems to be aligned with nothing in particular, facing no-one, contributing who knows what.\u00a0 But \u2013 walk a little further on, down an alleyway and around a corner \u2013 and it opens up in all its strange glory, perched high over the Barrow on steeply sloping ground, its sparkling granite columns rising from a tended garden surrounded by high walls and railings (fig. 2<\/em>)<\/strong>.\u00a0 This half-hidden space is surrounded, for its sins, by plastic rubbish bins, broken glass, old gas cylinders, mangled rusting construction fencing, and a surfeit of those towering flowering plants which are quick to colonise neglected cubbyholes.\u00a0 If there is a Baalbek of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, this is it.\u00a0 Some acrobatics involving an old stone wall and it is just about possible to capture the Grecian portico minus the decay and abandon, but why take an untruthful photograph?<\/p>\n There are no known drawings or letters pertaining to this courthouse.\u00a0 We do not know for sure who the architect is, or when precisely it was started or finished.\u00a0 Here the legends and myths have taken off like the surrounding weeds.\u00a0 Firstly, some have suggested the ‘Court-House’ mentioned in 1746 is the building we see today, and that it represents the ‘only legacy of [Bagenal’s] grand dream for a New Versailles’ [5].\u00a0 Others have added to the confusion by missing out on a critical comma, suggesting the original building was a ‘Square Court-House’, whatever that would be [6].\u00a0 In truth it cannot be part of Bagenal’s eighteenth-century scheme: Lewis (1837) and Fraser (1844) both refer to a ‘lately erected’ courthouse, with the latter describing an Ionic portico, and calling it a ‘remarkable object’; Lewis mistakenly and confusingly talks about ‘four Doric pillars’ [7].\u00a0 Whatever the English Gentlemen saw in the 1720s, it was not the building we have today.\u00a0 Furthermore, it cannot be the only surviving piece of the grand “Versailles” plan: Walter Bagenal was almost a century dead by 1835 when, paradoxically, it is claimed by the same sources that he employed Daniel Robertson (d. 1849) to design the building.<\/p>\n Enough of the myths and legends.\u00a0 It is clear from researching the history of the building that the year of construction is not circa<\/em> 1835 as currently thought, but almost a decade earlier: 1826.\u00a0 This distinction is important, as it reattaches the commission to the great national wave of provincial courthouse building in response to a combination of agrarian unrest, legislative reform from Westminster, and Grand Jury competitive pride.\u00a0 The source for this new evidence is, perhaps unexpectedly, buried in the annual reports of the Inspectors General for Irish Prisons.\u00a0 Major R.R. Woodward, Inspector for the Southern Division, noted in 1824 that ‘A GAOL and court-house are to be established [in Bagenalstown], but are not as yet built’ (by ‘gaol’ he meant a small bridewell, in effect a few holding cells) [8].\u00a0 Then, in a report dated 1st<\/sup> February 1827, he says ‘In both these places [Bagenalstown and Tullow] new court houses and places of confinement have been built since my last inspection.\u00a0 The court houses are on a good plan, quite suited to the importance for the use for which they are intended.\u00a0 But the Prison Act has been wholly overlooked in the plan of the Bridewells attached’ [9].\u00a0 Three years later he notes ‘The two cells at Bagenalstown are no longer used for prisoners, which is quite right, as the accommodation was illegal’ [10].<\/p>\n Accounts from the Board of Works show that money was loaned to the Carlow Grand Jury to help build Tullow Courthouse around this time, but none was offered (or sought) for Bagenalstown [11].\u00a0 Nationally this is unusual \u2013 Grand Juries regularly part-financed their building projects with central government money, generally repaid over 10-20 years [12].\u00a0 Lewis (1837) says the new court house was ‘erected at the expense of Philip Bagenal [1796-1856]’ who inherited much of the Bagenal family property (and indeed changed his surname to Bagenal by Royal Licence) in 1832 [13].\u00a0 This, coupled with Woodward’s condemnation of the attached bridewell, gives a valuable insight into the building and its context: it seems likely the courthouse was a pet-project of the young Philip, who financed it from his own private wealth.\u00a0 In a classic sounding of late-ascendancy liberalism, he seems not to have cared for government approval of the attached holding cells: the pointlessness of shutting them down just three years after construction certainly suggests this.\u00a0 Perhaps he saw it as important to continue the “improving” work of his great-grandfather.\u00a0 Or perhaps the building is a kind of folly.\u00a0 After all, its best view is to be gained from the outskirts of the town, on the road to the family’s Dunleckny property.\u00a0 Here the pediment rises spectacularly above the surrounding buildings, and entering by the banks of the Barrow, there is a sense of anticipation that surely echoes the grandest of enlightenment planning.\u00a0 The Bagenals would have seen it every time they entered their town, every time they acted as magistrates in their courthouse [14].<\/p>\n In spite of the lack of any definite evidence, it seems very likely Robertson was indeed the architect.\u00a0 Myles Campbell at Trinity College Dublin has recently found evidence that Robertson was active in Ireland much earlier than previously thought \u2013 as early as 1818 \u2013 and so the construction date of 1826 does not necessarily exclude him as architect [15].\u00a0 Some of his other commissions, in particular Upton House in County Carlow, and the older of the gate lodges at Castleboro House, County Wexford, are stylistically very close to Bagenalstown (the appearance of an Ionic portico at the former is especially striking) (fig. 3<\/em>)<\/strong>.\u00a0 If not Robertson it is unclear who else the architect could have been: Thomas Cobden (1794-1842) perhaps, but the skilful rendering at Bagenalstown of the Greek Erechtheion Ionic, with a turned corner volute, is more sophisticated than the rudimentary quality of much of Cobden’s work (fig. 4<\/em>)<\/strong>.\u00a0 Until new evidence comes to light, the attribution seems reasonably safe: during the 1830s and 40s Robertson built houses for many members of the Newton-Bagenal family, including, not least, the new Dunleckny Manor in a Tudor Revival manner [16].<\/p>\n In the ten-year period from 1825 to 1835 the Grand Jury of Carlow, with the notable help of some of the landed elite like Philip Bagenal, rebuilt all the court houses and gaols in their county [17].\u00a0 Accounts show over \u00a315,000 was spent in this period, a figure which does not include some government loans or indeed private munificence.\u00a0 Over the next twenty years, only a third of this sum was expended: in other words, there is a discernible (and as yet underappreciated) great decade of building.\u00a0 Bagenalstown fits into this broader context, but clearly it also stands out as odd and perplexing for many reasons.\u00a0 Lovable and strange, a gleaming granite folly in the Carlow landscape, or perhaps a light-hearted piece of civic architecture in a county which escaped much of the agrarian violence and outrages which racked Cork, Tipperary and the midlands for much of the 1820s and 30s.\u00a0 ‘I am always rejoiced’, an unusually placid Lord Norbury said addressing the Carlow Grand Jury in 1826, ‘when I come to this part of Ireland which enjoys so much happiness and tranquillity, at a time when other parts of the country are overwhelmed with criminal excesses’ [18].<\/p>\n And what came of Robertson, the architect?\u00a0 His later life was less cheery: declared bankrupt in 1841, he is memorably depicted by Mervyn Wingfield (1836-1904), seventh Viscount Powerscourt: ‘He was much given to drink, and always drew best when his brain was excited with sherry.\u00a0 He suffered from gout, and used to be driven about in a wheel-barrow with a bottle of sherry; while that lasted he was always ready to direct the workmen, but when it was finished he was incapable of working any more’ [20].\u00a0 Perhaps similar shenanigans took place on the banks of the Barrow.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.buildingsofireland.ie\/app\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Bagenalstown-Courthouse-02-Representative-View.jpg\")
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