Mount Stewart: The House

You can add Mount Stewart to our list of favorite homes and gardens. It is filled with original furnishings and furniture, it and its families were of historic interest, its gardens are among the very best we've seen, and it has one magnetic personality who accounts for much of its interest and charm: Edith, Lady Londonderry, wife of the 7th Marquess of Londonderry.

Entrance, actually the boring side of Mount Stewart

In the entry hall

Very 18th century; and gorgeous

A smidgeon of the 65 place silver collection

Edith, in uniform as leader of the Women's
Legion in WW1

She'll be remembered for many things, not least
the design of Mount Stewart's extensive gardens
(next post)

The Marquess and Lady Londonderry entertained many leaders
of the day, both in London and at Mount Stewart

For example

An earlier owner of the House, Lord Castlereagh, was an
architect of the 1801 Act of Union (from whence we get the
UK of GB, which then included rather more of Ireland)
as well as a military leader in the Napoleonic Wars and
chief diplomat in the ensuing Congress of Vienna; one of two
paintings from Wellington...

Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, eventually
2nd Marquess of Londonderry, to whom history
and poets have not been kind: "Posterity will
ne'er survey/A nobler grave than this/Here lie
the bones of Castlereagh/Stop, traveller, and
piss" (Shelley)

"Your pal, always--N"

Some of the good china

George Stubbs' famous painting of the Hambletonian, winner
at Newmarket in 1799, in an impossible pose

Library

Faux book-lined shutters

Breakfast room; great view of the Shamrock Garden, as I recall

Note ceiling fixture

Matching marquetry below on the floor

Upstairs, a print of the Duchess of Devonshire...a relationship
with the Londonderrys we have not quite yet figured out

Upstairs

All the guest bedrooms named for cities

Chapel

Springhill House, Londonderry County

Northern Ireland has a number of National Trust sites, and we wanted to see at least Springhill, Mt. Stewart, and Castle Ward, all quite comparable to Trust sites we have seen in England and Wales. Springhill is a late 17th century manor house, part of the Ulster Plantation, and in the hands of the Conygham and Lenox families from that time until 1957. Amazingly, the contents of the house are all original and contain some real treasures. And no, we did not see the ghost, although the guide, a particularly good one, certainly set the story well.

Springhill House

Knife and gun club, including some used to put down various
Irish rebellions; the blunderbuss, we learned, is actually
a ladies' weapon (don't have to be a good shot; to be fired from
the hip)

Knife and gun club, part two: a Kentucky rifle and a long rifle,
1680, used in defense of Derry

Extremely rare: death warrant for Charles I; Cromwell's signature is third down on
the left; it was death to own a copy in the Restoration; this is one of only a few
known surviving copies

Library, 3,000 books, largest private collection of 16th-17th in Ireland; original
edition of Hobbes' Leviathan, others

Traveling chest

Sitting room

Very old Steiff bear

Cane given by George III to a lady of the family after she had lost her leg

Black Wedgewood

Faux bread molds (it's a long story)

Grave marker from WWI France

Interesting antiques everywhere

Derry

Londonderry, if you're of the UK of GB bent. Northern Ireland is, but perhaps not for much longer. We drove in on a rainy Sunday morning, found a convenient parking lot, and spent a couple hours walking its walls and viewing a few of the landmarks. I was still feeling under the weather, but well enough to go for a full Irish breakfast at the end of our sight-seeing.

It's a walled city--the old bits-- and one of the things you do is
walk the walls

The whole place is admirably explained in
numerous signs; sadly, most of the history is
about the evils of religion and nation...but Derry
and the rest of Northern Ireland seem to be rising
above those things, offering some little hope for
the rest of the world...

It's quite a young city, as these things go

Street scene walking up onto the walls

Street scene from the walls

Northern Ireland voted to Remain--56%--and
people we talked to were angry and already
predicting reunification with the Republic of
Ireland...something unthinkable a generation
ago

An array of artillery from Derry's early days as a colonial
center

This one made in the reign of QE1

So it says

Tower of yore--1992, Vicki says

The Peace Bridge, a pedestrian bridge uniting the Protestant
and Catholic communities

Derry was a major point of departure in the
continuing Irish diaspora; Vicki conjectures
her "Scotch-Irish" ancestors may have departed
from Derry; I get all my scotch directly from
Islay and Highland Park

Walls and another portal

City Hall--beautiful sandstone Gothick--and home of the city
museum, one of the few cultural things open on Sunday morning

A happy ending for me; Vicki had her usual scone and tea