How Jeremy Irons Rescued and Restored a 15th-Century Irish Castle (original) (raw)

Somewhere between Ballydehob and Skibbereen, the G.P.S. directed me down a narrow country road toward an indentation in the southwestern Irish coast called Roaringwater Bay. The castle I was looking for had been one of the last to fall to the English, in the early 1600s, in a coda to the historic Battle of Kinsale, which sealed Elizabethan England’s conquest of Gaelic Ireland. The Crown’s forces had approached on horseback and by sea, with muskets, swords, and malevolent intent. I was approaching by appointment, in a white Kia Sportage. The road meandered this way and that until suddenly, around the last bend, a spectacular sight presented itself: Kilcoe, a terra-cotta-colored edifice composed of two towers, a thick one and a thin one, rising from a small island tethered to the mainland by a short causeway.

I was detected even before I reached the island. Through a slit window some 50 feet in the air—the kind from which men in metal helmets used to shoot arrows—a small white dog peered quizzically at my vehicle. At the castle’s gates, I got out of the car and buzzed the buzzer. A disembodied voice dictated a numerical code to use on the keypad. I punched in the numbers, and the gates slowly opened.

Twenty years ago, this place had been a ruin. Old photos I had seen depicted a run-down structure of weathered gray stone, roofless, its uppermost surviving floor exposed to the elements and covered in a carpet of grass and wild shrubbery. But this morning, Kilcoe cut a mighty figure, its main tower standing 65 feet tall, and the turret, conjoined to its sibling at the northeast corner, 85 feet. The crenellations in the towers’ parapets had been reconstructed to approximate how they must have looked in the 15th century, when the castle was built by a chieftain of the Clan Dermot MacCarthy. A burgundy pennant emblazoned with the word KILCOE streamed northwesterly from the turret’s lookout.

In the courtyard, I walked up to an imposing arched door, its heavy elm panels dotted with iron studs. Above it, to the left, inlaid in the wall, was a pale stone slab. Etched into the slab were the following words:

MANY HEARTS LIE IN THESE WALLS.
FOUR YEARS WE WORKED, AND WE
JUST DID THE BEST WITH WHAT WE KNEW.
AND WHAT WE DID YOU SEE.
A.D. 2002

Just as I began to wonder if my knocks on the big door were being heard, a smaller, hitherto unnoticed cutout door within the big door popped open, and through the opening bent the lanky body and familiar face ofJeremy Irons. It was an entrance evocative of Gene Wilder’s halting, hobbled first appearance in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory: Irons looked ashen as he beckoned me in and led the way, with a conspicuous limp, up a flight of outdoor stairs. Had living in this remote locale turned the handsome actor into a rickety invalid?

No, false alarm. Irons informed me that he had only recently awoken and was in momentary foot pain from a flare-up of plantar fasciitis. Within minutes, having drunk a mugful of coffee and smoked the first of the many hand-rolled cigarettes he goes through in a day, he had, like Wonka, unfurled into his full, charismatic self, ready to expound on a magical world born of his imagination.

“I remember the very first night I spent here on my own,” he said. “It’s a very interesting building, because it’s very male and erect: a phallus. And yet, within, it’s a womb. Very strange like that. And I thought, I’m completely protected. I’m away from everything. It’s a wonderful feeling. And that’s what it gives me.”

HIGH-RISE
From left, the castle before Irons began restoration, 1997; renovations in progress, 2001; a roof over his head, 1999.

Photos by Brian Hope.

Irons, I learned after two days at his side, is a man serenely comfortable in his own skin. He speaks without inhibition and does whatever he feels like doing, whether it’s sailing his yawl, the Willing Lass, heedlessly through the stiff gales of Roaringwater Bay, driving the local roads in his pony trap (his preferred, Anglo-Irish term for a horse-drawn carriage), or interrupting his houseguests’ sleep with theatrical wake-up announcements delivered through the intercom system that he rigged up to reach all the rooms in the castle. At the time of my visit, he had two friends staying over, both women. “Good morning, ladies!,” he intoned through the intercom, his plummy Jeremy Irons voice echoing throughout the ancient building. “It’s a lovely day. The sky is dry; the wind is low. Please come down to the smell of burning toast.”

His country uniform was a loose-weave three-button sweater worn over a Henley shirt, with baggy French workman’s trousers in a blue herringbone pattern and slip-on duck boots paired with red ragg-wool socks. Outdoors, he completed this ensemble with a backward-turned tweed cap. On any other human being save Samuel L. Jackson, this outfit would have looked ridiculous. On him, it looked smashing.

His body language, too, is something to behold. At 69, he has held on to his looks and still leans against walls and sprawls across sofas with the languid grace of Charles Ryder, the character he played inBrideshead Revisited, the 1981 British mini-series that sealed his stardom. What’s more, he has a dog, Smudge, who mimics his regal movements. A terrier mix procured by Irons from a shelter—it was she who first spotted me pulling up to the castle—Smudge accompanied Irons everywhere we went (with her master’s constant reinforcement: “There’s a good girl, Smudger!”) and followed his every cue: casting her glance pensively seaward when he did, matching him pace for pace as he bounded up Kilcoe’s steep staircases.

A man would need to be this self-assured in order to take on the daunting task of restoring a castle that had sat unoccupied for the better part of 400 years. And he would have to be especially trusting in his instincts—and, perhaps, a little reckless—to assume direct oversight of the project, as Irons did, with no credentialed architect, general contractor, or medievalist at his side.

“It was a load of amateurs setting to, following our noses,” Irons said. At any given moment, he told me, 30 to 40 people were puttering away on the premises—a motley assemblage of personal friends, Irish locals, and itinerant masons, woodworkers, and other craftsmen. “I told them all,” he said, “‘What you need to remember is that what we’re doing is a jazz theme on the medieval.’”

If that phrase conjures unwelcome images of suits of armor draped in animal-print throws while the music of Kenny G tootles faintly through hidden speakers, despair not. Kilcoe, while not remotely a faithful re-creation of what it was 600 years ago—it offers such modern features as hot and cold running water, electricity, and Wi-Fi—is a magnificent place: at once stately-home beautiful and slightly mad, a 360-degree immersion in its owner’s eccentric psyche.

Photos: Kilcoe Castle, Jeremy Irons’s Transformed Ruin

Photograph by Simon Upton.

Kilcoe Castle on Roaring Water Bay on the south western coast of Ireland.