Rockingham House stood above Lough Key at the heart of a great estate whose former nursery gardens, later purchased as The Nurseries, lay beyond a high wall and a bridle path. The house and its grounds appear in the narrator’s account both as a landscape of cultivated beauty and, after the 1956 fire, as a ruin amid the estate’s political division.

Estate and Setting

The grounds of The Nurseries had once supplied the Nash house above Lough Key. At the height of the gardens’ activity, fourteen gardeners worked the fields, and the head gardener lived in the stone house. The land retained traces of that former use: great trees, exotic plants and flowers brought from India and China, and walks grown over with grass. Its soil was rich, in contrast to the less fertile land elsewhere in the family’s rural world.

A gate in the high estate wall across the road from The Nurseries opened onto a bridle path leading through woods and pastures to Rockingham House. The path also carried a history of service and social distinction: the ladies of the estate had ridden along it to consult the head gardener about transferring plants and shrubs from the nursery grounds to the house gardens.

The Purchase and Family Life

Francis McGahern bought The Nurseries after prolonged negotiations, with his retirement in view. The property comprised a beautiful stone house and twelve acres. The narrator found it beautiful and enjoyed helping his father work the fields and wild gardens, cutting fallen trees, dosing the few black cattle, and clearing growth from the orchard.

As they worked, Francis repeated a formula of partnership: “Alone we are nothing” and “Together we can take on the world.” The house and land therefore represented more than a retirement setting. They gave shape to his hope that he and the narrator might work together again, with the narrator eventually becoming a local-school principal. That hoped-for partnership sat uneasily beside the narrator’s awareness of his father’s alternating charm and threat of violence; the natural beauty of the property did not erase the strain within the family.

Fire and the Division of the Estate

In 1956 Rockingham House burned down. Its 365 windows shattered and its roof collapsed; the fire lit the countryside for miles, reaching the dark slopes of the Curlews. The house was reduced to a shell of walls, while underground tunnels, wine cellars, the basement, and sunken tennis courts remained.

Francis suspected arson and began investigating, although Sir Cecil and Lady Stafford King-Harmon were photographed several times that week at the Newmarket Yearling sales. The account establishes his suspicion, not the cause of the fire. The estate itself was acquired by the Land Commission and divided into farms of sixty-five acres. Francis responded bitterly in a letter, asking whether the narrator could find influence for them in the politics of the division. The fire thus coincided with the end of the estate’s former unity: Rockingham House survived as a shell, while its surrounding land was broken into smaller holdings.