Burke's Guide to Country Houses, Vol. 1: Ireland

This is my second copy of this book, the first having been so eminently stealable that it was filched many years ago. Mark Bence-Jones clearly spent an enormous amount of time researching this book. It is encyclopaedic in nature being an alphabetical list of most of the country houses of Ireland. Each house has a short paragraph giving a potted history, frequently with a photograph and usually commenting on its current condition at the time of publication in 1978. Since the book was published so long ago, reading it can be painful as so many of the houses described have ceased to exist, vandalised by local councils or developers who have frequently swept them away to build a sea of identical little boxes on the parkland. This is an essential book for anyone with an interest in old houses, but it does have its defects. One serious omission is an index. Since the listings are in alphabetical order the author has not seen the need for an index, but this means that the houses can only be found if the original name is known. This can make it hard to find information on a ruin, particularly as when the metric 1:50,000 maps of Ireland replaced the old 1":mile series, the cartographers in their wisdom decided to drop the names of houses, erasing much of the country's local history at a stroke. An index by county would have been most useful and, given the comprehensive nature of the book and the large number of entries, writing one's own index is a major task - I speak from experience! Overall there is no substitute for this book and I would describe it as essential reading. As with all reference books of the type there are omissions; some quite hard to understand as, although there are many small houses covered, some very large mansions have been overlooked. Beware of the second edition; although no entries have been deleted, it represents an extremly lazy updating. The original is so good that it really shows up the weakness of the second edition. The new entries were not incorporated into the text, they were tacked on to the end as an addendum. However they are brief, not as well-researched as the original entries and there are still glaring omissions of important houses. Despite these criticisms I would whole-heartedly recommend this book.