By Gillian Kendall
Eighteenth Annual Solas Awards Silver Winner in the Funny Travel category
We were lost, and we didn’t even know what country we were in. My boyfriend and I were driving around near the unmarked border between Ireland (which is still in Europe) and Northern Ireland (no longer in Europe, still part of the UK), looking for our lodging, which actually was a Lodge: the Lodge at Castle Leslie. We were nearing the end of a long journey, flying from California, and the fulfillment of a travel fantasy: to stay at a real castle.
Our Peugeot (a rental upgrade that already had us us feeling like royalty) had come with a GPS, and the GPS lady charmed us with directions in a delightful accent, but as we entered the town of Glaslough, she wasn’t making much sense. She seemed lost, too.
We turned onto a narrow lane that in California would have been called an alleyway, but which was Glaslough’s Main Street. I peered up at the tall stone buildings, looking for turrets or drawbridges, anything remotely castle-y, while Vincent parallel-parked on the left — but not too far left! Driving from the airport, my beloved already had scraped a few curbs and even off-roaded once, spattering our rear left fender with authentic Irish mud.
Our GPS friend insisted we’d arrived at our destination, but all we could see were mundane, flat-fronted buildings. And ahead of us, Main Street came to a dead end.
But at the T-junction was a stone building – old, blackened stone, with a double-triangle roof, like a fairy house – no, wait, like a castle! As we rolled up, a man in a jacket with a green tartan waistcoat emerged to greet us.
After asking my name, the gatekeeper said, “You’re in the castle,” which confused me – we clearly were not in the castle, but parked on the road — until I realized he meant that we’d been upgraded again and would be sleeping in the castle itself and not, as I’d expected, in the Lodge.
The gate opened and we headed through the stone posts and into a green, winding drive through massive trees and past a pretty (and pretty famous) stone chapel. After about half a mile, we emerged from the trees and saw our digs.
Castle Leslie is a huge, asymmetrical, 150-year-old mansion, built from the hewn stones of the original, much older, castle. Since the 1660s it’s been the home of the Irish branch of Clan Leslie. The house and its predecessor have hosted royalty, artists, and rockers such as Mary, Queen of Scots; W.B. Yeats; Irish Statesman Michael Collins; and Mick Jagger. And as everyone kept telling us, Paul McCartney got married in the chapel! But for now, it would be hosting us: would we measure up?
It was daunting. Vincent stopped the car before the sweeping, circular gravel drive that led to the front entrance — an archway of reddish-gray stones leading to two massive wooden doors. “Where are we supposed to park?” he said. We couldn’t see any other vehicles, and the Peugeot, swish though it was, certainly wasn’t in keeping with the magnificent building before us; the entry looked more suitable for a horse-drawn carriage. But, with nowhere else to go, we crunched hesitantly over the gravel towards our first castle.
A well-dressed, bearded man whom I thought must be a lord came out and greeted me by name, and then other people appeared and opened doors and lifted bags, seeming not at all inconvenienced by our awkward, weather-beaten luggage and our awkward, beating-around-the-bush directions about what we wanted and did not want carried in.
I felt an immediate, very American shyness at having someone wait on me, let alone heft my boyfriend’s duct-taped suitcase, and Vincent seemed even more confused: he started introducing himself to the staff as if we were all at a cocktail party.
We climbed up the steep front steps, gaping at the stonework, paintings, and Medieval shields and swords. It was overwhelming, but the glowing fire in the vestibule warmed and welcomed us. We fumbled in our bags, preparing to produce credit cards and passports, but the receptionist dispensed with all that. After leading us to where we’d sleep – the Chinese Room – he gently offered an invitation to a “bubbles reception in the drawing room” in a little while – if we “felt like coming down.”
We felt very much like coming down, though it was hard to leave our bedroom. The Chinese Room was actually a little suite of oddly shaped nooks, halls, and roomlets, including an area with a gleaming, antique copper bath overlooking the grounds, and a big bed with a red, upholstered headboard.
Among the Asian antiques, someone had left us a card, a box of exquisite chocolates, and a bottle of French champagne, all set on the most ornate dressing table I’d ever seen (later, I’d learn it had been brought to Castle Leslie from the Malacañang Palace in the Philippines). Our many windows overlooked another wing and the front lawn, and one of the window nooks could be shut off from the main room with long, red curtains flowing 20 feet up to the ceiling. Closing the curtains created an enticing little reading niche where I wanted to spend the week or the rest of my life.
The loo, too, was fascinating: hidden behind a secret door was a modern, spacious, beautiful bathroom featuring an old, spacious, beautiful toilet. Its polished dark wooden box hung on the wall above a matching chest on the floor. The chest’s lid opened to reveal a worn, glossy seat above the porcelain bowl. It was a Thomas Crapper, model circa 1890, and would prove a most comfortable, hygienic, and altogether homey, um, throne.
Forgetting our jetlag, we washed off some plane grime, changed into the best clothes we’d brought, and decided on one of several routes downstairs. The sprawling main staircase was lined with oil portraits of Leslie family members, and bedecked with curious objets d’art – including a picture-boxed quill pen used by His Holiness Pope Pius IX, which reminded me that I still didn’t know what country we were in. The papal memorabilia suggested (but by no means confirmed) that we’d not yet reached Northern Ireland, but the Anglican chapel (where McCartney got married!) suggested otherwise. I was too afraid of looking stupid to ask.
We wandered around till we found the correct drawing room, and entered a little self-consciously. Would we be surrounded by members of European aristocracy? Would Keith Richards stumble up to chat? What did people staying at castles talk about? I couldn’t think of anything to say. except “Wow!”
But we shuffled in, and someone proffered champagne, and after a toast or two, we were chatting with other guests. A couple from Belfast told us that their daughter had been married at Castle Leslie the preceding year. That they came from Belfast suggested (but by no means confirmed) that we had crossed into Northern Ireland, but it no longer mattered where the political boundary lay, since we’d obviously entered some kind of dreamland.
The drawing room was full of family memorabilia and curiosities: old sepia photos of the Leslies, and, in a framed glass box, what looked like an antique girl’s dress but was actually a christening gown – which, a small note said, had been worn by Winston Churchill. The whole scene was improbable: who were these people who kept a prime minister’s baby clothes lying around?
Champagne and asparagus canapes in hand, we strolled out the French doors into an even more unlikely spectacle: golden, summery sunlight lit up the Renaissance gardens, where yellow daffodils and blue lilies were blooming, the fountain burbled, and an ivied archway framed a view of the lake. “Don’t get used to this,” I told Vincent, because such weather was unbelievable, especially in April, especially in Ireland (or, perhaps, Northern Ireland). Through the soft Irish air, soft Irish accents wafted from gold-lit windows. Our nervousness melted away.
Later, I’d learn that we were standing in the favorite spot of Samantha Leslie, the current guardian of the Leslie Estate. She lives now in the same wing of the castle she grew up in, she mingles often with guests, and I was dying to meet her.
When I did, I tried not to gush but I did admit, “I’ve always wished I owned a castle.”
“Why?” Our host sounded horrified. “People say, ‘Oh, I just want to be a princess in a castle,’ and I say, ‘No you don’t, because you’re always on duty.’ You look at the royals and how hard they work; that thing about padding down to the kitchen in your pajamas with your slippers on, half asleep for a cup of tea, or sitting in your garden and not having to be polite to anyone, is something people take for granted.”
When I asked her about living in such an incredible place, she said, “Everything is normal for everybody, if that makes sense.”
And in that vein of normalcy, she put us on a first-name basis, saying, “Please call me ‘Sammy.’ It’s only ‘Samantha’ if I’m in trouble, which I hope is not today.” In answer to my envious questions, she was candid and unaffected. She explained about having her family history and her current work all right there at the castle. “There are ups and downs…it’s a long way to find anything, but I live in a wing of the house, and I’ve got an office in my garden shed. It’s lovely living on site.”
Goggling a little, I asked her when she’d first realized that her circumstances were unusual. She didn’t, she said, until she went to school. “Who made me feel different was school teachers. I went through nine schools by age 15, and really struggled with dyslexia and eye tracking.”
Undiagnosed and without learning assistance, she was unfairly criticized by her teachers. “They told me, ‘Who do you think you are? You’re lazy, you should try harder; you just think you’re special; you’re from the big house,’” she said. “I came from a very literary family, but I was dyslexic and not reading and writing in the normal fashion. The teachers put it down to my thinking I was special because I came from a house like this. They were not kind!”
But before I could feel sorry for Sammy, she added, “But the rest of the kids couldn’t give a toss. When I went to their houses, it was warm and cozy, and you could find everything. Here, if you lost a sock, you just gave up; you’d never find it again…”
There were a few other drawbacks to castle living, Sammy said. “When we grew up, there was very little plumbing in the house. The bath in the Chinese Room was always there, but on that floor, there were only two loos. We had one shower in the house, but it was a long way away.”
Vincent and I appreciated Sammy’s point about it being easy to lose things in her home. On our first morning, I went down to breakfast a few minutes early, planning to order a pot of tea for when he joined me. A quarter-hour later, I went looking for him — searching the main staircase, and the hallway for the lift, and the many adjacent rooms and passages with their many separate doors, but he wasn’t there, so I gave up, as Sammy used to with her lost socks.
A few minutes later he appeared at the table, saying, “Where were you? I’ve been looking all over for you.”
Sammy said that living in “the big house” allowed for great entertaining, but the family that called the castle home never were snobs. “It’s a party house,” she said, “built for entertaining and hospitality. “My brother’s 21st birthday was amazing…there was an Irish band called the Chieftains…it was during the oil crisis, but everyone managed to get petrol to get here, and then stayed for a week. It was quite mad!”
One night outside Conor’s Bar, Vincent and I met a young Irishman in a tux who was there on a stag night, preparing to be best man at a wedding the following day. Bursting with recently acquired knowledge, I said, “Did you know that Paul McCartney got married here?”
He took a polite drag on his cigarette. “Not once in the planning of this event,” he said, “has Castle Leslie been mentioned except in conjunction with Paul McCartney’s wedding.”
Sammy laughed when I told her that anecdote, adding that the ex-Beatle’s wedding was “an amazing time. But we grew up with all sorts of people, the likes of Mick Jagger coming to stay, lots of different people popping in and out. But we were taught to judge everybody the same – it’s not a person’s race or nationality or the size of their car – it was: Are you kind? Do you have a good sense of humor? Are you curious about life? Do you try to do the right thing? Background didn’t matter whatsoever; everyone was the same around the dining table.”
Encouraged by her openness, I continued with what made me curious. I told her that I’d admired some wizard-ish wallpaper in the rather dark area by the lift. She grinned, saying, “It is Harry Potter, and It glows in the dark!”
“I didn’t see that!” I said.
“No, guests don’t,” she said. “You can’t turn the lights out on guests; that’s not allowed!”
Sammy said that the Chinese Room had been her bedroom when she was growing up and that the dressing table from the Philippines was a family heirloom, brought there by her granny.
“It’s real!” I said, stating the obvious. “I mean, all these things are valuable and can’t be replaced. Doesn’t it make you nervous to have them being used by strangers? What if someone left hot coffee on that dressing table or knocked the champagne over or something?”
Sammy laughed. “Don’t you think we knocked the champagne over?”
She went on, “Ninety-nine percent of [guests] are fabulous—but accidents happen. But we also broke things when we were kids!”
The fabulous antiques and unusual furnishings, Sammy said, are “layers upon layers” that you’d have in any family home. Not only is it the place her people have lived for generations, but it’s also a working farm and equestrian center. “Castle Leslie,” she said, “is a living, breathing estate. It was built as a home to entertain and to share, to have lots of people come and enjoy it.”
But not every day there has been a fairy tale. When she came back home at age 24, after studying in Switzerland, “The wing of the Long Gallery was very derelict,” she said. “There was hay stored in the billiard room and the basement and the top floor had flooded.” Even when she was growing up, the roofs were leaky. “It’s quite a big house, 28,000 square feet, with a lot of roof and a lot of lead, and it rains a lot in Ireland! Dad would say it was like an upside-down ship; you just have to stop the water getting in. There was a lot of years of just keeping the water out.”
“We were all delighted when Kraft brought out square buckets [originally used for mayonnaise], and you could put them together to catch the drips. With round buckets there was always a gap between the rounds where the rain managed to get in the leaky roofs.”
Sammy’s down-to-earth manner made us feel comfortable asking questions and exploring. It turned out we were close to, but just south of the border to the North.
One day, I surprised my boyfriend with a horse-drawn carriage ride around the estate. He wanted to walk around the lake that morning, and insisted on going out the side entrance, while I was trying to steer him to the front steps where our carriage (unbeknownst to him) was waiting.
When, finally, a staff member came and collected us, he thought we were in trouble…had we been found out as Californians? Had we dropped marmalade on the carpet or mentioned the Troubles in the wrong tone of voice? But then, he saw the horse and carriage.
Henry the horse’s breath steamed in the cool morning air, and after greeting him (and our cheerful, red-cheeked, human drivers Oren and Peter), we climbed on and pulled the thick wool blankets over our knees. Henry first pulled us near the equestrian center, by the fields where his friends snorted with interest as we passed. We could easily smell the wild garlic springing up through the marsh, and with a little imagination we could also smell the wild bluebells opening beneath the neon-yellow gorse.
We bumped gently along the old, unpaved lane through the trees, taking the route that people had traveled for hundreds of years. The estate woods were quiet and thick: we drove along through a green tunnel of huge trees, passing the occasional bright glade or stone building, until we reached the planned gap in the trees – it was an opening designed 150 years ago to give new arrivals a magnificent view of the castle. Our view was breathtaking but the surroundings very calm.
It was all quite fairytale, yet we thought of all the humans who had passed here before us. “This is exactly how people would have arrived at this castle hundreds of years ago, before cars,” Vincent said. He meant the clop-clop of horse hooves, the loud, lilting birdsong, the swans swanning around the lake, and the view of the old building across the dark-mirror lake where Mary, Queen of Scots once famously fell in.
I asked the driver to stop a while, so that Vincent and I could relish the peaceful Irish silence, the same silence as it had been centuries ago. We knew exactly where we were, and it was where we wanted to be. For a long time, we stayed still and quiet, breathing the cool, moist air, hearing the birds singing their spring songs, and feeling, at least for the moment, that we belonged.
~~~
| Gillian Kendall is an American-Australian writer who has visited seven continents and lived in five countries. The author of four books, she does all sorts of writing: travel and nonfiction journalism, as well as fiction, essays, and memoir. Her first travel book, Mr Ding’s Chicken Feet, was a New York Times Book of the Year; subsequently she edited the collection Something to Declare: Good Lesbian Travel Writing. She lives in Northern California. |