Grevisk

Grevisk is the setting of The Nurseries, a country house and estate Francis McGahern purchased with retirement in view. Its cultivated grounds and wooded approach first give John McGahern a landscape to admire and work in alongside his father; later, the property stands within a household increasingly marked by conflict and by Francis’s plans to leave.

The Estate and Its History

The Nurseries was a stone house on twelve acres outside the Rockingham walls. The land had once served as the nursery gardens for the Nash house above Lough Key. At the estate’s height, fourteen gardeners worked the fields, and the head gardener lived in the house. Its history remained legible in great trees, exotic plants and flowers brought back from India and China, and walks that had grown over with grass.

Grounds and Connections

A gate in the high Rockingham wall stood across the road from the house. Beyond it, a bridle path ran through woods and pastures to Rockingham House. The path recalled an older connection between the nurseries and the estate: ladies of Rockingham had ridden along it to consult the head gardener about plants and shrubs for the house gardens. Unlike the poor land elsewhere in the family’s rural experience, the soil at The Nurseries was rich.

Purchase and Shared Work

Francis’s acquisition was deliberate, not an impulsive purchase: he bought The Nurseries after lengthy negotiations, with retirement in mind. John McGahern found the place beautiful and enjoyed helping his father there, cutting fallen trees, dosing the few black cattle, and clearing growth in the orchard. As they worked, Francis repeatedly invoked togetherness as a source of strength: “Alone we are nothing; together we can take on the world.” The shared labour briefly offered common ground between father and son, though it did not erase their deeper differences.

Family Tensions and a Possible Departure

The estate’s apparent promise coexisted with strain inside the household. During one Christmas visit, John McGahern helped his father with the land while conflict between Francis and Agnes McShera shaped life at home. Dympna had become sullenly submissive, while Frankie was openly confrontational; Francis used threats and abuse, and Agnes answered him with a subtler form of control. The property could shelter work and beauty, but it did not restore domestic calm.

Francis eventually spoke of selling The Nurseries and moving to Dublin. John McGahern initially regarded the plan as impractical: the estate was beautiful, Agnes’s mother and family lived nearby, and neither Francis nor Agnes knew Dublin well. But the proposal was more than one of Francis’s passing schemes. Soon after John returned to Dublin, Francis sent him a letter dated 8 January 1960, enclosing a sale advertisement for a large, rundown property above a greengrocer’s on the North Strand.

A Site of Family Crisis

Grevisk also became a point of departure during a period of acute family trouble. When Margaret needed treatment, Maggie and Pat drove to Grevisk and took her to Ballinamore, where she waited for a place at Blanchardstown Hospital. Francis did not visit her during the six months she spent there, despite the hospital’s relative proximity. At the same time, Frankie’s conflict with his father reached a breaking point: after Francis attacked him and Frankie fought back, Frankie travelled overnight to Dublin. These departures show Grevisk not only as a carefully acquired retirement home, but also as a place from which members of the family had to leave amid illness and escalating conflict.