That country house is about 6 miles away from where I live in Galway, Ireland. I took that picture a few months ago. The house really is something else. It belonged to the local landlord; Trench was the name of the family. Nobody lives in it now and it is falling into disrepair.

But every time I look at it I still see it as it would have been in the early 1900's, when there would have been a team of labourers, maids and servants.  Horses and carts would have been in use and steam trains would have passed through the grounds on the railway line.

The Trench family were meant to have been very good landlords and had set up a work house and a free food place for the starving people of the Irish famine. They were very charitable. In the Great War they took in Belgian refugees and had set up a trust fund. During the troubles following the Easter Rising, when most landlords fled to Britain fearing the worst, the Trench family stayed, even after Irish independence, and no harm came to them.

However the only son, The Honourable Frederick Sydney Trench was killed during the Great War. He died of wounds at Beaumont Hamel on the 16th November 1916 aged 21 having been wounded the previous day. He was a Lieutenant in the King's Royal Rifle Corps and had been educated at Oxford University. Apparently his mother never recovered from his death and he was meant to be a most remarkable man, and even though he was of Church of Ireland faith he has had a plaque commemorating him in the local Catholic Church.

The de Stacpooles who were some relation to the Trench family had both of their sons killed int he Great War too. Which I presume meant all potential heirs in Ireland were gone. The house passed on to some family in England, who never visited it.

It really is absolutely beautiful though. I guess I really like it and appreciate it because the time period that interests me most is the 1890's and 1900's, and every time I see it, I see it as it would have been then. If I ever could I would buy it, and try and repair it to its former magnificence. But in seeing it I still see it under British rule, and I think of Lieutenant Frederick Trench who would have grown up there, walked through it and saw what I saw 100 years before I have.

People around here don't talk about the Great War, they talk about the uprising. They forget that 1,100 Galway men died in the Great War. They forget that people in Ireland also ran out onto the streets celebrating their war. Just last week I found out that this little run down house 100 metres down the road from where I live, where on my first visit to Ireland I remember these two old ladies who are now dead. Their surname was Glynn. In that house a Martin Glynn had once lived, some relation to them I am sure. He joined the army at the outbreak of war, one of the 270,000 Irish men (40% of the adult male Irish population) who did. He had risen to the rank of Second Lieutenant and was KIA 29th September 1918, aged 24. I would imagine that no one in the locality knows or wants to know of him. His memory, though I honour it, will be forgotten. He is truly a forgotten soldier, and no doubt Frederick Trench is as well.

So is Second Lieutenant Roderick de Stacpoole, one of the de Stacpooles mentioned above, who I have found out died a most heroic death aged 19 on 11th March 1915. This is the report his CO gave:

If you see Humphries tell him how deeply the whole brigade regret the death of that high-spirited boy, de Stackpoole, in years only a child, with the face of a girl, he had the heart of a hero. He was killed carrying a telephone wire across an open, fire-swept field. Having put his men in safety, he took the post of danger himself.'

Anyway I'm rambling and only a few people will see ample substance in this to respond, and respond with what I don't know. But I have pictures of the inside of the house and grounds, and also the stables and I will post them if you want me to. But here are 2 inside the house. I might also take  a picture of the Glynn's little house.

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Punctured bicycle on a hillside, desolate,
Could nature make a man of me yet?

It's a shame people let historic things like this go down hill. I would have thought a place with so much history would have had pride for those who lived around it, and they themselves would have wanted to uphold it.

It's a shame. Such a pretty place

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History makes the future