Lambay Castle – Looking Back on Edwin Lutyens’s Creation for the Baring Family and its Recent Restoration

By Millie Baring, great-granddaughter of Cecil and Maude Baring

The island of Lambay, a few miles off the coast of County Dublin, Ireland, presents an air of mystery even to its closest neighbours. Some have likened it to the island that Prospero inhabits in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. With a rich history of monasteries, pirates, Viking raids, shipwrecks, prisoner-of-war camps and coastguard stations, it became, at the start of the 20th century, home to a newly-wed couple, my great-grandparents, banker Cecil Baring (3rd Lord Revelstoke) and his American wife, Maude Lorillard.

Cecil and Maude were seeking an idyllic getaway where they could explore their twin passions – nature and the arts. They bought the island in 1904 and, in August, 1905, commissioned Edwin Lutyens to renovate the late 15th/ early 16th-century fort there and transform it into a romantic castle and home. “The couple had seen Lutyens’s work in Country Life,” says Louis Jebb, the Barings’ great-grandson. “Between 1902 and 1905, it featured several Lutyens projects, including Fulbrook and Deanery Garden, and they approached him in 1905, based on that.”

“Cecil and Maude were both interested in architecture,” continues Jebb. “They’d worked together on an architectural commission before they married. In league with Maude’s first husband, Thomas Suffern Tailer, they commissioned architects Warren & Wetmore to design a new real tennis court at Tuxedo Park in New York State, completed in 1899. The Barings’ knowledge of architecture provides some background as to why the couple were such good clients to Lutyens.”

Lutyens first visited the island in August, 1905, and revisited it several times thereafter. According to a diary entry of Maude’s, the Barings gave Lutyens the final go-ahead to renovate the castle in March, 1908. The first phase of the work was completed two years later. Family history is carved into the fabric of the castle with its many quintessentially Lutyens details. The original cast-iron guttering carries Cecil and Maude’s initials intertwined with the date of completed work on the castle as well as references to the builders and craftsmen who brought Lutyens’s vision to life.

The castle nestles in the island’s more sheltered west side within a circular perimeter filled with sycamore trees before the land rises to the highest point, Knockbane, 125m above sea level. The gradual blending of nature and architecture is a key feature of Lutyens’s design. As you approach the castle from the harbour, there’s no path leading to it. The first sign of a path comes after you enter the main gate to the castle. This consists mainly of grass, edged with flagstones, and leads through a wood. Through a second gate, the path switches to flagstones edged with grass. Once inside the castle, the wooden floors and rugs echo the grass squares on the flagstone paths. Much of the furniture in the castle, for example its dining table and chairs, was designed or selected by Lutyens, whose vision of the interiors matched that of the Barings.

The Barings considered Lambay their private Arcadia, and Lutyens worked on further projects for them. These included a real tennis court, built on the seafront from 1921 to 1922, and alterations to the existing chapel – to which he added new casement windows and a pedimented west front with Doric columns – and former coastguard cottages. Lutyens also designed The White House for the Barings’ daughters, Daphne and her sister, Calypso, which was completed in 1933. Today it is a guesthouse used by visitors to the island.

The Barings and Lutyens became lifelong friends. A delightful snapshot from 1936, taken by Betty Hussey, wife of Lutyens’s biographer, Christopher Hussey, shows him walking hand in hand at Lambay with Cecilia and Lucy Pollen, daughters of Daphne and her husband, Arthur Pollen, both Catholics. That year, Lutyens worked on proposals – his sketches are in the RIBA Drawings Collection in London – for a second remodelling of the chapel for the Pollens in a more Catholic/ Tuscan idiom, including a campanile to mark the Angelus and mass times, but these plans were unexecuted.

Lutyens’s son, architect Robert, was particularly fond of Lambay. “Its green ascent to Knockbane filled my idle reverie… The smell of the castle came back with it to mind – that of the old house as well as the beautifully contrived
additions. It was something special to every building my father had had a hand in: if I woke up tomorrow in an unfamiliar room I would know at once by a scent too subtle to analyse if I was in one of his houses. It was composed in part of hewn oak and fresh plaster, stone and wood smoke; but it was more than the sum of these, and I have never achieved it in any building of my own.”

Rupert Revelstoke, youngest of the Barings’ three children, inherited the castle and took over running the island. Today, Lambay remains under the protection of the Revelstoke Trust, with the Barings’ great-grandchildren at the helm. My brother, Alex (7th Lord Revelstoke), and I run the island, with invaluable support from our extended family and local allies. Beyond the castle, gently grazed grassland and swathes of ferns, bracken and gorse stretch towards the east, where wallabies – originally from Dublin Zoo and introduced to the island 40 years ago – and deer coexist quietly, mingling occasionally with the island’s Lleyn sheep and nesting birdlife. A prodigious colony of grey and harbour seals breeds each year on the island’s coves.

Much of the built fabric at Lambay was restored between 2014 and 2016 under the joint supervision of Alex, Dublin-based architect David Averill and Fingal County Council to ensure all renovations and additions respected the original Lutyens designs. “The works at Lambay focused primarily on the updating of services within the castle complex and the insertion of two additional bathrooms and an improved kitchen in the guest wing,” explains Averill. “A complex planning application was steered through the planning process encompassing other works on the island, too. These include multiple listed buildings, national monuments, archaeological sites and sensitive ecology. The insertion of new services utilised existing routes to minimise any impact on the historic fabric.”

The island is currently supported by a mixture of lowland farming, agri-tourism and whiskey production. Our Lambay Whiskey is made using the island’s fresh spring water from Trinity Well and aged by the sea in old Cognac casks. Our intention has been to establish a micro-distillery but this was delayed by Covid; it’s now due to be installed in 2022.

We promote a sustainable way of living through our Lambay Club, organising retreats and gatherings which reflect the island’s ethos of protecting the planet, the community and the individual through a more symbiotic way of life. Our dream is for Lambay to one day become a research and education centre for biodiversity, sustainability and regenerative farming.

To live on the island, off-grid and surrounded by such romantic history and natural beauty is a privilege but it comes with the huge challenge of protecting and preserving such a place – one that comes with joy, purpose and pride at times and at others great worries and despair. Each year brings hope in small successes, to be followed by frequent tests of will and strength. But it only takes seeing the look of wonder, delight and appreciation in a new visitor’s eyes to remind us how important our work is. Private day trips and overnight stays can be arranged directly with us for suitable guests who will protect and respect the island’s nature and heritage.

Louis Jebb supplied historical photographs and textual materials from the Baring family archive for
this article.
For more information on Lambay, visit:
www.lambayisland.ie/visit
www.islandclub.co
www.lambaywhiskey.com