Duelling, revolution and a picture-perfect cottage in Ireland

At about 2pm on August 25, 1769, two Irish MPs, James Agar and Henry Flood, rivals for the control of the parliamentary borough of Callan, Co Kilkenny, met to fight a duel at Dunmore Park just north of the city of Kilkenny. Having discharged his pistol first and missed, Agar called out to his opponent: ‘Fire, you scoundrel.’ Flood shot him dead, the bullet — according to newspaper reports — piercing his left breast. This encounter between two well-known figures became notorious and seems to have encouraged the practice of duelling in Ireland, which remained common well into the 19th century. For present purposes, however, it also introduces both the social circle that created Dangan Cottage and the political context that shaped it.

Flood’s second for this bloody encounter was Gervase Parker Bushe, then High Sheriff of Kilkenny. The previous year, in February 1768, Bushe had married Mary, the real focus of our story and to whom we will return. She was the daughter of the Recorder of Dublin and the sister of a young man then training for the bar, Henry Grattan. Flood, Bushe and Henry Grattan, in other words, were well known to one another.

They all came of prosperous Protestant stock and, to different degrees, were politically active by the mid 1760s in the Irish Patriot cause. This sought the reform of the Irish parliament in Dublin and to secure recognition of the political integrity and interests of Ireland. Their cause responded to the American and French Revolutions and was overthrown by the events of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland and the Act of Union that followed in 1801.

Flood and Grattan both went on to enjoy considerable celebrity as Patriot leaders and fell out in the 1780s. Bushe had a more understated career, but only marginally so. A decade after the duel, he stood for election as MP for Kilkenny against James Agar’s son and, although he lost the vote, successfully overturned the result. He was then appointed a commissioner for Revenue on a generous salary and became more sympathetic to the Government.

A visit to France in 1789 made him sceptical of the Revolution and in 1790, as a founder member of the Royal Irish Academy, he produced an acclaimed paper estimating Ireland’s population as ‘above 4,040,000’. His calculation was based on Hearth Tax returns, for which he was responsible. Bushe died in 1793 at the family seat of Kilfane House, two miles north of Thomastown, Co Kilkenny.

Soon after this, in about 1795, one of the Bushes’ nine children, a daughter, Harriet, married John Power (later Sir John Power, 1st Baronet of Kilfane). The couple rented, then bought the Bushe family seat, which they rebuilt in 1798.

Part of Kilfane’s appeal doubtless lay in its proximity to Kilkenny, a bustling and fashionable centre of late-18th-century social life in Ireland akin to Bath in England. Its wide society suited John, who was an obsessive huntsman, so much so that, in 1797, he purchased a pack of hounds and established the Kilkenny Hunt Club, the first venture of its kind in Ireland. His twin brother Richard, who divided his time between Kilfane and Dublin, shared in this venture. He combined it, however, with another passion: acting.

Richard’s interest took formal expression in The Private Theatre in Kilkenny, which he ran with great success from 1802–19. Its extensive repertoire, played by actors of social standing in front of audiences of their peers, however, had a pre-history in country-house performances around the city. The anonymously published The Private Theatre of Kilkenny (1825), which records the history of this initiative, notes that Henry Flood, Gervaise Bushe and Henry Grattan were all involved in amateur plays from 1774. It adds that Flood and Grattan appeared together as Macbeth and Macduff in Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish Tragedy’, roles that anticipated their subsequent political rivalry.

All these details matter because they indirectly illuminate the lives of two women whose interests and activities — which are almost impossible to trace in the historical record — created Dangan Cottage as we see it today. The first of these was Mary Bushe, who must have moved out of Kilfane House soon after her husband’s death in 1793 and taken up permanent residence at Dangan, about two miles south of Thomastown on the banks of the River Nore.

In the course of her married life, she was presumably party to much political discussion and must have struggled to deal with the tensions that surfaced between her brother and husband. As a widow, however, she surely remained in touch with the roaring social life of Kilfane House, presided over by the second woman who concerns us, her daughter Harriet (from 1836, Lady Power).

Neither mother nor daughter seems to have appeared on stage, although Harriet may have composed a prologue to a play in 1802. Both were also necessarily marginal to John’s enthusiasm for hunting, predominantly a male pastime. It’s tempting, therefore, to infer that their interest was directed in a completely different direction and explains the appearance of new landscape gardens in the newly fashionable Romantic aesthetic at both Dangan and Kilfane during the 1790s.

Which garden had precedence is impossible to determine, but each must have informed the other. It seems likely, as a matter of shifting tastes between generations, that the Romantic sensibility would have been picked up by the daughter and passed on to the mother. Whatever the case, work at Kilfane presumably got under way in about 1798, when the house was rebuilt. Here, the new landscape garden — recently restored and now known as Kilfane Glen — had as its centrepiece an artificial waterfall and cottage orné.

Nothing is securely known about the corresponding work at Dangan. A house certainly existed here in 1786, when The Post-Chaise Companion described it as ‘the seat of Miss Hewetson’ (a statement repeated in later editions even after it had changed hands). It’s not clear what this house looked like, but much of it is probably fossilised within the present building.

Dangan is laid out on an irregular plan (Fig 1) with four radiating wings, respectively a main block containing reception rooms and a bedroom — now the entrance hall (Fig 4) — a bedroom range, and a kitchen and service block, portions of which may incorporate the remains of a medieval tower built by Odo Archdekin in the 13th century. Mrs Bushe cosmetically recast the main domestic range with a thatched roof and verandah (Fig 5). Grilled windows fringed with stained glass were installed and although the whole was pointedly renamed a ‘cottage’, it was effectively a villa on an intimate scale.

At the same time, she transformed its setting. A Gothic arch was constructed to screen the property from the road (Fig 2), which was reputedly diverted away from the building to create what became locally known as Madame Bushe’s Corner. If the 1839–40 Ordnance Survey map accurately records her planting, the surrounding garden was laid out in two parts with a small formal grid of borders to the north and east and a naturalised landscape with walks dropping south to the river. This gave the house views over the river and the ruined medieval tower of Grennan Castle on the far bank, a perfect Romantic eye-catcher. There was also a thatched hermitage supported on tree trunks with a moss house beneath and a ‘rustic bridge’ crossing to an island.

The result, although diminutive in scale, clearly attracted attention and in The Irish Tourist (1815), Anthony Atkinson speaks of the ‘celebrated cottage of Dangan, the seat of Mrs. Bushe, a little object, which the traveller notwithstanding one defect, which may be corrected, will certainly find worth visiting’. The defect in question was ‘the border of a young plantation on the lawn, which in a line parallel with the river, partially intercepts the view… shutting out the grandeur of nature’.

It seems a bold observation, given that Mrs Bushe was a subscriber to the book, although Atkinson acknowledges ‘the evident elegance of the place’. He thought the ‘moss-house… composed of an elevated and a subterranean apartment, exceeded, in point of beauty and variety, every thing of that kind which I had seen in the progress of my travels’. He pompously concludes: ‘Praise, when you can — But when you must — condemn.’

Mrs Bushe died a year later, in 1816, and by 1821 Dangan Cottage was occupied by a certain Mr Joseph Greene, possibly a lawyer. By September 1826, it was being advertised to ‘sportsmen’ for let or sale with 14 acres of land in the Dublin Evening Post. ‘The premises have been much improved of late,’ readers were assured, with ‘good stabling and [a] coach-house.’ The property, it continued, was ‘within two miles of Mr Power’s fox hounds’ and ‘beautifully situated on the banks of the River Nore’. Thereafter, for the next century, the house passed through the hands of numerous different owners and tenants, many of their names preserved in local newspaper notices and administrative documents.

In 1831, for example, it was the home of one Charlotte Mary Scott and in April 1849, a Mrs Bermingham. On April 8, 1863, a Mr Tate ‘late Master in the Royal Naval School, New Cross London, and in King Edward VI’s School, Marlborough’ ran an advertisement in the Wexford Constitution offering places at ‘Dangan Cottage, Thomastown’ for ‘the sons of gentlemen preparing for the Colleges, the Public Schools, or the Mercantile profession, and requiring tuition in the Classics, the Mathematics, the French and English Languages and Drawing’. He promised ‘moderate’ terms. It was probably then that the house was re-roofed in slate, shorn of its rustic verandah and re-fenestrated with a series of bow windows.

By 1870, Dangan was up for let again, unfurnished, but — according to advertisements — newly painted and papered and, on October 9, 1875, its entire contents were offered for sale. There was an S. W. Davis in occupation in 1879, a William Percival in 1888 and, by 1896, it was the home of the local doctor, Patrick Murphy and his wife, Georgina. Dr Murphy died in 1932 and his wife in 1948, after which the entire contents were again auctioned and the house sold for £3,000. In 1968, it was purchased by Lord William and Lady Beresford, who removed the Victorian bow windows.

When the present owner bought the house in 2013, it required extensive renovation, including the replacement of the roof and the renewal of services. The fabric was repaired making use of architectural salvage, including doors, shutters and chimneypieces, to preserve and enhance its historic character. Mr Moore went on to furnish the main interiors — an enfilade of Tapestry Room (Fig 8), library (Fig 3) and drawing room (Fig 6) — in a similar spirit, with many items from Irish country houses. Portraits, paintings, ceramics and furniture came from places such as Russborough, Co Wicklow, Carton, Co Kildare, and Headfort, Co Meath, to name but a few. There are other items, too that have caught his discerning eye, notably Aubusson and Flemish tapestries, as well as late-18th-century French toile fragments that now dress a bed (Fig 7). It looks like a collection assembled over many generations.

Meanwhile, Mr Moore has worked to restore the garden and its buildings. In 2017, a new rustic bridge was constructed, inspired by the Chinoiserie designs of 20th-century garden designer Russell Page. There are plans to restore the moss house and the verandah, surviving iron elements from which have been rediscovered. What has been achieved so far promises well for these endeavours; in country-house terms, Dangan Cottage has become again, as Atkinson acknowledged in 1815, a little object certainly worth visiting.

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.