In Ireland, until recent years, the great house or manor house was known simply as the Big House. In George Moore’s Hail and Farewell, for example, it is to the Big House that the peasants on the Moore estate trudge each rent-day in their long frieze coats. His friend Yeats, it is true, speaks in loftier tones—Dramatis Personae opens with a description of “the three great demesnes of three Galway houses, Coole House, Tullyra Castle, Roxborough House”—but then Yeats had the gift of an elevated style. “The Big House” was a less modest term than might appear. A wealth of cultural history, of the relationships of social classes over the course of several centuries, could be brought to an account of its derivation.
But there is no longer need to insist upon accuracy. Roxborough, the house of Lady Gregory’s family, was burned during the Civil War. Cole, her own house, was more recently sold to a local builder, who knocked it down and carted off the stones. Nothing remains save the somber view foretold in Yeats’s poem, nettles waving upon a shapeless mound and saplings rooting among the broken stone. Moore Hall was also burned by the Irregulars. The gutted shell is standing, its vacant eyes staring toward the small lake of which George Moore had often written. The social revolution which accompanied Ireland’s political liberation is given special bitterness by the fate of houses such as these three, which were linked in special ways to its literary renaissance.
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