A village built to a plan, 1740s
An Baile Nua
John Villiers, 1st Earl Grandison, sat on the Dromana estate and decided in the 1740s that what west Waterford needed was a linen industry. So he built one. He laid out a single street running back from the Blackwater quay, put up a church in 1748, a rectory, a school, a court, a barracks and twenty-four weavers' houses, and shipped in linen-weavers from Lurgan in County Armagh to work the looms. At its peak the Douglas factory was turning out around 75,000 yards of sail-cloth a year. All of the original buildings are still standing.
1826, papier-mâché. 1849, stone.
The Hindu-Gothic gate
Henry Villiers-Stuart married Theresia Pauline Ott in 1826 and brought her home from honeymoon via Brighton, where John Nash's Royal Pavilion was a few years old and very much the thing. The tenants of Dromana, wanting to do something for the new mistress of the estate, built a triumphal arch over the bridge into the demesne in the Pavilion style — onion dome, minarets, ogival arches — out of wood and canvas and papier-mâché. The couple loved it so much they kept it. In 1849 the architect Martin Day rebuilt it in stone and stucco, where it still stands over the River Finisk. The Buildings of Ireland lists it as the only known example of Hindu-Gothic architecture in the country.
Church of Ireland, given to the Catholics, kept by neither
The chapel that changed sides
Lord Grandison's 1748 chapel served as a private Church of Ireland chapel-of-ease for the estate for two centuries. In the 1950s, with the Protestant congregation reduced to almost nobody, an agreement was reached with the Catholic Bishop of Waterford and Lismore to hand it over for use as a Catholic church — the first time, locally at least, that such a transfer had happened. The Catholic side then decided three parish churches were enough and didn't take it up. It closed in 1955. In 1974, President Erskine Childers came down and re-dedicated the building for ecumenical use. It is now the village community centre.
FitzGeralds, Villiers, Villiers-Stuarts
Eight hundred years, one family
Dromana has been held by the same descent line since the FitzGeralds of the Decies built a tower house above the Blackwater in the 1200s. The Villiers came in by marriage in the 1700s — Lady Gertrude Villiers married Lord Henry Stuart, and the surname doubled up into Villiers-Stuart. Henry, of the 1826 honeymoon, was their son. The current generation gives the tours, runs the gardens, and lives in the house. An hour with them is half house-history and half family-history and you mostly can't tell where one stops.