altinaghree Castle, Longloand Road, Donemana, Strabane BT82 0PN

Altinaghree Castle, Donemana

Altinaghree Castle is a ruinous mid-Victorian castellated country house built around 1865, situated in open countryside on an elevated site to the east of Donemana village, on the north side of Longland Road, in the townland of Liscloon Lower. It is a picturesque if bleak ruin that dominates the surrounding landscape and remains a distinctive local landmark. Though the exterior form is largely intact, featuring some well-crafted masonry detailing, the building is roofless and retains almost no interior detailing. It represents a late example of the symmetrical castle style. The property is recorded as derelict and is also a scheduled monument. It is privately owned and is not listed for either architectural or historical interest, though it qualifies for record only on account of its historical associations.

Architectural Description

The house is a symmetrical three-storey, three-bay castellated country house, rectangular on plan, with a four-storey central tower and the remains of a return wing to the north. A porte-cochere projects to the east. The roof is entirely gone, but was formerly concealed behind a castellated parapet. The walls are built of locally sourced rock-faced coursed schist with sandstone dressings. A string course runs at parapet level, and all corners are clasped by slightly projecting piers that rise above parapet level and are detailed with arrow and musket loops. All dressings are stone. Windows are generally mullioned and transomed, with segmental heads to the ground floor and square heads to the upper floors except where otherwise noted; most have label mouldings and stone sills. No glazing remains. Rainwater goods are missing.

South Garden Front

The south elevation is symmetrical and five openings wide, rising to the four-storey tower above the central openings. The tower is flanked by lesene strips that rise above parapet level to form tower pinnacles. The central bay has oriels on corbelled bases to the second and fourth floors; the fourth-floor oriel has only its base remaining, while the second-floor oriel has a decorative interlacing stone parapet detailed with quatrefoil apertures.

West Elevation

The west elevation is detailed as the south but is three windows wide, with an oriel to the second floor and a roundel to the raised central section. There is a central segmental-headed door opening with a bull-nosed stone step. This elevation is extended to the left by the remains of a two-storey return wing (described further below).

North Elevation

The north elevation is abutted at the right by the remains of the return wing, and the four-storey tower sits in the re-entrant angle between them. At the centre is a large depressed pointed-arched stairwell window with perpendicular tracery, rising almost the full height of the building and lighting three flights of stairs — the most impressive surviving feature of the house. The remaining windows on this elevation are irregularly arranged. There is a pointed-arched door opening with hood-mould to the left of the stairwell window and to the tower. The tower carries a roundel datestone, partially illegible, but bearing what appears to be the date 1860. The return wing has only two walls remaining; its windows are square-headed with label mouldings and chamfered surrounds.

East Entrance Front

The east elevation is three windows wide, symmetrically arranged about the central porte-cochere. The porte-cochere is roofless and has a depressed pointed-arched opening to each cheek and a pointed-arched rebated opening to the east face, flanked by lancet niches. The ground-floor windows are segmental-headed with mullions featuring slender colonettes. To the first floor there is an oriel as described above on either side and a central slender Venetian-style window supported on stone colonettes. The second floor has a bipartite round-headed window opening with a central colonnette.

Gate Lodge and Entrance Screen

The house was formerly approached from the east by a winding track, now open pasture, marked by a stone gate lodge and entrance screen. Both are constructed of rock-faced sandstone matching the main house. The entrance screen is castellated and has a mock machicolation frieze over a Tudor-arched coach arch; the reveal is ashlar stone with vermiculated springing stones. The screen is flanked by a tower to the right and a two-storey lodge to the left. The lodge has a shallow pitched corrugated metal roof and a square-headed window with label mould at each floor to the east and west elevations, with the remains of metal-framed windows surviving. The lodge is linked to the screen by a two-storey entrance bay with a pointed-arched door opening on each side, surmounted by a blank stone cartouche.

Setting and Walled Garden

The house stands in open farmland on an elevated site with commanding views over the surrounding countryside. To the south is a small levelled area, now grassed and contained by a stone retaining wall. The demesne is bounded by a stone boundary wall. To the east of the house are the remains of a walled garden; its walls are of brick in stretcher bond and contain several camber-headed niches, as well as a single surviving elliptical-arched entrance opening in the north side.

Historical Background

A house first appears on this site on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1853, captioned Liscloon House. By the time of the third edition map this had been replaced by a different structure captioned Altinaghree Castle, surrounded by a wall, with Liscloon Cottages and a Lodge shown nearby. By the fourth edition the castle is shown in ruins.

Griffith's Valuation (1856–64) lists a house, offices and land, with the buildings initially valued at £62 and eventually reduced to £14. The reduction appears to reflect the separation of farm buildings, outbuildings and cottages from the main house. Buildings listed include stables, a garden house, a stalling house, a granary, a cow house, a steaming house and a piggery. The house is recorded as owned by William Ogilby in fee. An annual revision note of 1861 records that the existing house was being demolished and that Mr Ogilby was building a very fine new house, with a further note valuing the new house in 1864. By 1865 it had been valued at £190 and was listed as a house, offices, gate lodge, land and plantation. According to the Natural Stone Database, the materials used are local Dalriadan schist and Barony Glen sandstone. A local newspaper account from the Strabane Weekly News of 4 January 1975 records that the stones were brought by horse and cart from Dungiven, County Londonderry, that stonecutters from the Barons Court Estate were employed, that masons were paid one shilling per day and labourers ten pence, and that when finished the banquet room was said to be unequalled throughout Tyrone.

William Ogilby

The house was built for and is of historic interest as the residence of William Ogilby, a London barrister and distinguished naturalist who was a contemporary and acquaintance of Charles Darwin. Ogilby was a Fellow of the Geological and Zoological Societies of London and Dublin and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He served as honorary secretary of the Zoological Society in London from 1839 to 1846, after which he settled in Ireland following the death of his father. His publications included The Natural History of Monkeys, Lemurs and Opossums; Observations on the history and classification of the marsupial quadrupeds of New Holland; Observations on the structure and relations of the presumed marsupial remains from the Stonesfield oolite; and On the character and description of a new genus of carnivore called cynictis. He served alongside Charles Darwin on a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science charged with drawing up rules for standardising zoological nomenclature, and it is considered likely that he took part in early discussions about the significance of fossils in the lead-up to the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859. Locally, Ogilby was remembered simply as a successful farmer and proprietor who entertained lavishly, bringing in cooks from Belfast and Dublin for his banquets. A dinner invitation card dated 12 December 1872, requesting attendance at a dinner party to be served at 3pm, was still in the possession of a later owner's family in 1975. Ogilby had returned to Ireland and married Adelaide Charlotte Douglas, daughter of the Reverend Charles Douglas of Earls Gift, in 1851. He died in 1873, not long after completing the castle.

Claude William Leslie Ogilby

Following William Ogilby's death the castle passed to his son Claude William Leslie Ogilby, who is listed as occupier in 1876. Claude married Bessie Henrietta, daughter of Captain William Grant Douglas, in 1875. From 1888, when the house is listed as vacant and leased from the Trustees of Claude W. Ogilby, the building deteriorated rapidly and decreased in value. The first reduction was to £78, then to £70 in 1889, when the house was first described as a castle in the valuation records. By 1892 it was described as dilapidated and its value reduced to £5. Samuel Eaton became the lessor in 1905. A note of 1909 records that the floors and windows were gone and the building a ruin, and in 1910 it was deleted from the record altogether, although the gate lodge continued to be occupied. Claude died at the early age of 43, apparently having left the house six years before his death; the fact that his affairs were in the hands of trustees suggests bankruptcy. A contemporary newspaper account implies that the upkeep of a large castle had proved overwhelming in the context of Gladstone's land reforms. Claude William Ogilby is recorded in one edition of Burke's Landed Gentry.

James Douglas Ogilby

William Ogilby's second son, James, is also remembered locally and went on to follow his father's naturalist vocation. Folk memory in the area holds that James fell in love with a factory girl he met when returning from a hunt meeting at Dunnamanagh, and that following his family's opposition to their marriage he vanished from the area in 1875, returning seven years later in 1882 to marry his sweetheart, who had waited for him. James subsequently emigrated to Australia, where he became regarded as one of the foremost experts in natural history in the region. He published numerous books and papers, mostly on Australian fish, including Notes on some fishes new to the Australian fauna (1889) and Edible fishes and crustaceans of New South Wales (1893). He held posts at the Royal Aquarium New South Wales, the Australian Museum and the Queensland Museum, and gave his name to several species of fish. He was highly regarded by colleagues; the Proceedings of the Pacific Science Congress of 1930 noted that not until the late James Douglas Ogilby finally located at Brisbane did the study of Queensland fishes really reach its present perfected state.

Architectural Assessments

The architectural historian Hugh Dixon wrote in 1987 that the castle would have been regarded as wildly unfashionable by many contemporaries, observing that it looks more like the sort of castellated factory which Pugin derides than the naturally planned, colourfully designed country houses then in vogue under Ruskin's influence, and that it was no surprise that it had a very short active life, noting also that dinner at 3pm was definitely a very late hangover from Georgian times.

Jeremy Williams, writing in Architecture in Ireland, 1837–1921, noted that the architect responsible is unrecorded, but identified many parallels with the Londonderry Apprentice Boys' Hall of 1873 by J. G. Ferguson before bomb damage — specifically the same segmental mullioned windows and shallow oriels — suggesting that Ferguson, better known today for his industrial architecture, may have been involved. Williams described Altinaghree as more castellated mill than castle, and noted that it is referred to as a castle for the first time in 1872. He described the plan as entered through a porte-cochere on the side along the axis of the central corridor, with the three main rooms strung out along the garden front, the main staircase set into a triple-arched composition but taking up the minimum of space, all like an office block, with four-storey towers in the centre of each front and three floors elsewhere. Williams also noted, citing Pevsner, that the building is crisply observed to be better as a ruin.