[Extracts from Hillsborough Castle, by John Lewis-Crosby, William Maguire, Peter Rankin, Charles Nelson and Belinda Jupp; published by the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society in 1993.]
[Extract from the history of the house by Peter Rankin]
The Castle is an unassuming late-eighteenth century mansion house.
Being at the centre of Hillsborough it is more akin to an English
manor house than to most Irish houses in their demesnes, some
distance outside town or village. A little confusing in its layout,
the house started as a rectangular block on the west side of the
entrance courtyard, and what now appears to be the principal part,
the long south front, was only a later addition - the original
house was added to piecemeal over a period of about 80 years.
The first house on the present site was built by Lord Hillsborough
sometime after 1758: a rectangular house is shown on an undated
map, probably pre-1770. This was the core of the block which contains
the present entrance hall on its east side and the dining room
on its west. A drawing of c.1795 shows the centre part of the
two storey seven-bay west front much as it is now, three windows
under a central pediment set forward slightly beyond a further
two bays on either side. A drawing by R. F. Brettingham was exhibited
in the Royal Academy in 1797, the year when the house was 'completed'.
Brettingham's contribution however was not to design the house
from scratch but to re-vamp, add a library to and make more sophisticated
and acceptable to late-eighteenth century metropolitan taste an
earlier house by another hand. Though much extended after 1797,
the house we see today is still in the understated French-derived
style of Brettingham and the Henry Holland circle.
For the second half of his life the first marquess was in debt.
His son however married an heiress, the Hon. Mary Sandys, in 1786.
While the first marquess had commissioned Brettingham initially
to improve a not very pretentious house, it was the succession
of the second marquess in 1793 and his marchioness's money that
enabled the plans to be carried out on the ground. In the early
1790s Brettingham added a library south-east of the original house,
and a year or two later the remainder of his thirteen-bay south
front.
Until after 1833 a public road to Moira passed immediately along
the south side of the house, leaving the Square about where the
Doric temple at the east end of the garden terrace is now: a wall
and shrubbery divided the courtyard in front of the house from
the Square and from the road. Because of the proximity of the
road no rooms in the original house faced south, and Brettingham
located the offices at the south-west corner of his south front,
where the Throne Room is now. It was only after the road was closed
in the later 1830s (Canon Barry states the date of diversion as
1826) and the land south of it incorporated in the garden that
the south front was extended to its full length and assumed its
present importance. The Friends' Meeting House, about where the
tennis court is now, on the south side of the road to Moira in
a group of small holdings, had to be re-located in Park Street.
Further alterations and additions were made in the late 1820s
by Thomas Duff, and in the later 1830s and 1840s, it seems with
William Sands as architect: the south front was extended to the
east and the pedimented four column giant Ionic portico added,
a symmetrical seventeen-bay elevation of two storeys being obtained
by the demolition of the western-most bay on this front.
It is true that an 1810 'Plan of the Park and Demesne Lands at
Hillsborough...' by John Webb shows the road to Moira already
re-aligned; the land to the south of the then Brettingham thirteen-bay
south front incorporated as part of the park land; and a driveway
sweeping up to an entrance in the centre of this south front from
an inset gate sweep and lodge where the Quaker Gate is now. But
the Plan specifically states it to be a plan 'with some alterations';
Webb did not show the Friends' meeting house and graveyard, these
being only pencilled on as were a number of other boundaries and
roadways then actually existing on the ground; and the 1833 Ordnance
Survey still shows clearly the public road passing immediately
along the south side of the house, the land south of it not parkland
or garden. So Webb must have been suggesting to Lord Downshire
the sort of parkland setting the Castle could be given if, or
once, the public road was diverted. The plan does show a pair
of squares, marked gateway, just about where the Doric temple
is now, so this temple may possibly date from around 1810, the
intention being to duplicate it as a pair of lodges either side
of a gateway from the Square. But the Doric lodge is not obviously
discernible on the 1833 ordnance map. All in all, it is not clear
that the immediate surroundings of the Castle ever existed as
shown by Webb.
For a family occupying such a prominent place in the social hierarchy
of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and possessed
of so very extensive a property, the Downshires' principal Irish
residence was hardly equal to their place in society - the church
they built was more architecturally ambitious. Admittedly, we
see the Castle after a fire in 1934 and after a long period of
lack of family occupation and cherishing, but it cannot have been
a house with the architectural presence of many houses in the
demesnes of Ireland. And yet, for all that it is a friendly house.
A little bland perhaps, but not oppressive or severe or gloomy.
Recent works undertaken by the Advisory Committee and its Consultant,
Mr. John O'Connell, the Dublin architect and interior decoration
consultant, have sought to give more conviction to the period
feeling of the house as a country house, to reinforce and supplement
the inherent character it has....
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