By Damian Murphy
The leafy shores of Lough Ennell, near Mullingar, are the setting for a spectacular sham ruin, Ireland’s largest folly, the rugged silhouette of a medieval palace providing an appropriate backdrop for a true-life Camelotian tragedy that saw the early promise of marriage descend into jealousy and recrimination, with brother pitted against brother—the vindictive protagonist at its centre, Robert Rochfort (1708–74), Earl of Belvedere, being redeemed only by his taste in architecture.
Rochfort, scion of the Rochforts of Gaulstown, married in 1736 as his second wife the sixteen-year-old Mary Molesworth (1720–75), but the union was an unhappy one marked by prolonged periods of separation as he pursued his political career in London. Mary’s friendship with her brother-in-law, Arthur Rochfort (1711–74), aroused the suspicions of her absentee husband, who in 1743 accused the pair of adultery. Mary was abandoned and kept under house arrest in Gaulstown; Arthur was sued for £20,000 in damages and, unable to pay and facing imprisonment, fled into exile; Robert retreated to his sporting lodge at Belvedere and a life of renewed, albeit unofficial, bachelorhood, described by one of his contemporaries as ‘all debauchery and dissipation’. That Belvedere looked out over Tudenham Park, the seat of George Rochfort (1713–94), another brother with whom Rochfort had an uneasy relationship, is given as the motive for the construction of the sham ruin, which not only blocked the view of his brother’s offending pile but, as a bonus, screened a farmyard so that the prospect from Belvedere was a visually unencumbered bucolic idyll.
The sham ruin measures 55m at its widest point, 18m at its highest, but stands on shallow foundations and so, for stability as well as visual interest, is given a series of projections and recesses converging on a concave arcade with a semi-polygonal turret marking one extremity and a semicircular turret marking the other. The lowest level is blind, its rubble surface showing the sockets left behind by the timber framework used to support it during construction; the upper levels are pierced by pointed-, round- and square-headed openings with finely tooled limestone casings. The ‘Y’-mullioned openings at its centre give the impression that the palace was reduced to ruins not by gradual decay but abruptly and violently, and read sequentially as intact, damaged and wholly destroyed as if by cannon fire.
Styled the ‘Jealous Wall’, jealous being a euphemism for spiteful, the sham ruin is the finest of a nationally important collection of follies closing scenic vistas around the Belvedere estate. While the Gothic Arch and Octagonal Gazebo are attributed to the architect-cum-landscape gardener Thomas Wright (1711–86), publisher of Six original designs of arbours (1755) and Six original designs of grottos (1758), the Jealous Wall lacks the classical symmetry associated with his designs. Its authorship is therefore as mysterious as its architecture.
Damian Murphy is Architectural Heritage Officer, NIAH. Series based on the NIAH’s ‘building of the month’, www.buildingsofireland.ie.