First, the building of the Big Houses; and the laying out of their parks and gardens, their furnishing and their plumbing and heating - or the lack of them. Second, the private lives of those who lived in the Big Houses, many of them as racy as the stock characters of Irish fiction: duels, adultery, abductions, family feuds - and extravagant hospitality leading to gout and insolvency. It also deals with their relations with their retainers and servants, often very different from the ordered English life 'below stairs'. Third, the book sketches in the relation of the Big House with the world outside its gates, including its response to the horrors of the Great Famine, to the Land War of the 1880s - and to the Troubles of the early 1920s, which led to the burning of over seventy country houses and the collapse of the Ascendancy world. Finally,, the book deals with the survivors who chose to stay on - and the astonishing renaissance of the Irish country house in the twenty-first century. - from the front flap of dust jacket.
