The Master of Glenveagh

Glenveagh National Park lies at the heart of the Derryveagh Mountains

in the north-west of County Donegal.

It's a remote and hauntingly beautiful wilderness

of rugged mountains and pristine lakes.

It's the second largest of Ireland's six National Parks

and, like so many properties that now belong to the state,

Glenveagh Castle was given to the nation by a generous benefactor.

These benefactors are often completely unknown

to the wider public.

So who was Henry McIlhenny,

what brought him to Donegal and what lay behind his decision to make such

a generous gift to the people of Ireland?

Glenveagh was his theatre.

It was his whole life to entertain people

and he was very good with people.

He was always being bugged by people to do his memoirs, write a book.

"Henry, your mem..." He said, "I'm too busy making new ones."

I think he is an example of an underexplored...

..range of Ulster-Scots people.

The dinners were part of the fun because he liked to put people together...

..where it would be interesting.

Lively!

He had a painter's eye, he had an art connoisseur's eye...

..and you can't really teach that.

I wanted to capture that moment...

..when you meet Henry for the first time and he's standing in the

doorway or something and his hands are usually behind his back and he's

beaming and he liked it very much,

he said that's the way he likes to see himself.

The history of Glenveagh has not always been as peaceful as it is today.

In order to create the large estate which eventually became the National Park,

its first owner John George Adair evicted 46 families from the land.

In 1873 Adair built a castle beside Lough Beagh,

modelled on Queen Victoria's Balmoral Castle in Scotland.

After he died, his American widow spent much of the next 30 years

at Glenveagh, becoming a society hostess

and well-liked in the locality.

In 1929, the estate was bought by another American,

Arthur Kingsley Porter, a professor at Harvard.

Kingsley Porter owned Glenveagh for just four years before

he disappeared mysteriously and his widow sold the estate

to a 27-year-old American with Ulster-Scots roots, Henry McIlhenny.

The Ulster-Scots people particularly in Donegal would have come over here

in quite big numbers in the 17th century.

There was a plantation designed by James VI of Scotland,

or James I of England, to kind of settle people

who would behave themselves in Ireland, effectively.

And so a number of families and indeed communities were more or less

planted here from Scotland.

The McIlhennys were one of the Ulster-Scots families

that settled in Donegal.

James McIlhenny, Henry's great-grandfather,

was a successful cloth merchant in Milford, but in 1843 he became

seriously ill, and on his deathbed he urged his young wife

to take their four children to America.

Looking at, you know, the number of the passenger lists,

this is by no means an unknown phenomenon.

This might be the best opportunity that a widow could take.

Mary Ann McIlhenny set sail for America with the children.

Her eldest child, John,

was just 13 when the family arrived in Philadelphia.

They stayed in the city for a few years, before moving

to Columbus, Georgia, where John studied to become an engineer.

My grandfather was born in Ireland, invented a gas meter,

and it really had the monopoly.

And he moved from Columbus,

where he was the Mayor for 20 years after the Civil War,

and came to Philadelphia.

The Scotch-Irish...

..were fundamentally...

..religious people.

They were God-fearing, they felt that that should rule one's life.

They were very strict Presbyterians, at least my father was,

and I was made to go to Church every Sunday,

and we weren't allowed Sunday newspapers,

and there was no music and no card-playing on a Sunday,

and it was rather dour.

The Scotch-Irish have always felt that it was important to give back.

There was essentially the feeling that what you had been given,

what you had been gained, what you had gained,

was really in trust.

So consequently, it was incumbent on you to make sure that others gained,

that you would help the less fortunate,

and that you would support what you thought were worthy causes.

One of the many worthy causes supported by Henry's father was

the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is one of the largest and finest

museums in the United States. We are often considered,

next to the Metropolitan, which is a very special case,

we are considered as a peer of the museums in Boston, Chicago,

perhaps Los Angeles as well.

Great, great civic or metropolitan museums,

with deep and very rich collections.

The museum's collections are quite large -

they number about 240,000 objects in total.

They focus largely on American and European and Asian art.

Not the entire world, but on those three areas.

You know, it's a characteristic of American museums that they've grown

largely through philanthropy.

Their financial resources, their collections,

their programmes and exhibitions, they're all fuelled by donors.

The McIlhennys, considered as a family,

were amongst the greatest of Philadelphia's collectors.

The parents collected, in the fashion of their day, carpets.

And today, we have a wonderful,

wonderful group of carpets that they donated to the museum,

among many other things.

What's more significant, in a sense,

is that they passed on or instilled in their children a love for

the Arts and a love for collecting,

and I would say a sense of connoisseurship that exemplified

Henry McIlhenny's approach to collecting.

Henry McIlhenny's collection was extraordinary and included works

by Renoir, Van Gogh,

Cezanne and Delacroix - all of which he donated to the museum.

In 1929, Henry McIlhenny went to Harvard, to study Fine Arts.

His ambition was to work at a museum and to become a collector.

In 1933, he went to the Fogg Institute to take the Museum Course,

the first of its kind.

His teacher, Paul Sachs, was a renowned collector of drawings

and had a profound influence on Henry.

Well, he was a remarkable man and very, very, very dynamic.

And I think most of us were a little bit intimidated by him,

because he had a rather sharp tongue.

He gave you the feeling that things were able to be acquired.

They weren't just dead,

like frescoes in a church that you couldn't possibly get hold of,

he made them feel available and possessable.

He advised all of us not to buy higgledy-piggledy, all over the map.

He said, "It's much better to concentrate on one field

"and develop that."

Encouraged by Paul Sachs,

Henry bought his first painting whilst still at Harvard.

In 1934,

he paid 30,000 for this oil painting by the 18th-century

French artist, Chardin.

At the same time, he bought this drawing by Corot.

Well, I didn't put the Chardin in my room, in Dunster House,

I must confess.

But there, I did have the Corot drawing.

I had the Seurat drawing, La Parade.

And all my contemporaries thought I was out of my mind.

-Why?

-Well, they thought they were bunk, junk.

Whilst studying at Harvard, Henry had met Arthur Kingsley Porter,

the scholar of French Medieval Art, who had bought Glenveagh in 1929.

Four years later, whilst staying in Donegal,

Kingsley Porter mysteriously disappeared.

Well, he was supposed to have gone bird-nesting,

looking for gulls' eggs of some sort,

fell off the cliff and was drowned.

But there were other people who said he'd deliberately faked his

disappearance and that they'd seen him in Paris with a girlfriend

years later, in the 1930s.

So nobody knew what the real truth was, except that normally,

if a body falls into the sea, if a person falls into the sea,

the body is usually found.

No body was ever found.

So there was always this big question mark that hung over

the disappearance of Arthur Kingsley Porter.

On hearing of Kingsley Porter's death,

Henry McIlhenny went to see his widow, to pay his respects.

She said that she would no longer want to come back to Ireland

without her beloved Kingsley.

She said she would have to go back in 1934 to sort of sort out what she

was going to do with the place.

And she invited Mr McIlhenny to come as a house guest.

So he did, because he was sort of interested in Donegal,

the fact that his great-grandfather came from Milford.

I guess she felt it overwhelming and said,

"Henry, are you interested?" And somehow...yes.

And he went, and they were there, and there was an amazing story

that Henry liked to tell, which was...

They were in the dining room, which has an alcove of glass, having tea.

And the way he told it is that...

..the room became very still and cold, and she said, "Henry, what's wrong?"

And he said, "Did you feel somebody, or something?"

And she said, "Why, yes, I did."

And he really, honestly thought...

And I think he liked to tell the story too,

because every castle needs some ghosts.

Erm...

But I don't think he was kidding all the way.

Glenveagh, at that time, was quite remote and very astringent,

and there was no gardens, no nothing.

The deal was made in 1937.

It was £25,000, which seemed a good buy.

It'd be expensive by Irish standards.

So he bought Glenveagh with 32,000 acres and a castle.

But he always talked about how Kingsley Porter disappeared.

And he'd said, the day that he signed to buy Glenveagh in 1937,

he asked the Porters' lawyers, Mrs Porter's lawyers,

"Whatever happened to Kingsley?"

He says, "All I can tell you that he is now dead."

But he didn't say how he died, or where he died.

Most people think that he disappeared off the island of Inishbofin and got

the boatman to take him back to the mainland and disappeared in life.

Didn't die then.

That was in '33. But the lawyer just said, in '37, that he is now dead.

By now, Henry was dividing his time between Philadelphia and Donegal,

where he spent the summer of 1939.

But on the outbreak of the Second World War,

he returned immediately to the United States.

The United States was not involved in World War II then.

And, he, er...

Not until 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

That brought the Americans in.

So he enlisted then in the Navy.

He became a commander and was based on the aircraft carrier,

the Bunker Hill, which was deployed in the Pacific.

On reporting for duty, his captain asked what he did in civilian life.

He was called Captain Yoho.

Y-O-H-O.

And he said, "What did you do in civilian life?"

And I said I was a curator at an art museum.

And I think if he hadn't been seated,

he would have fallen down with shock.

And then he said, "There's another officer coming from Quonset Point.

"I hope he wasn't a music critic!"

No doubt to the surprise of his commanding officer,

Henry went on to have a distinguished war record

and took part in major battles in the Pacific.

He would tell stories about how the Japanese kamikaze pilots

would dive-bomb the decks of their carrier,

kill lots of people and destroyed all their aircraft.

After the horrors of war, Glenveagh offered peace and sanctuary.

For the next 40 years, Henry spent every summer in Donegal.

Guests would normally stay for either a long weekend,

from Thursday to Monday.

Sometimes, they would stay one whole week.

He always had groups of people who were very interesting.

He knew how to combine people.

He was...

quite talented in that respect, you know.

Well, he'd come down to the kitchen...

..on a Monday, about ten o'clock, and he'd do the menus for a week,

with Nelly.

And then he had a guest list.

He'd put their names in the book and say which rooms they would be in -

the Pink Room, or the Blue Room, or the Tower Bedroom, or the Dovecote.

The mornings, people had the time to do what they wanted -

fishing, walking, hunting, whatever it happens to be.

And then a beautiful lunch,

and chitchat, coffee.

People would either go have a nap, or go reading, or write letters,

or sit and read in one of the beautiful rooms.

Those two carnations ought to go either side.

OK, that's good.

That's where we usually have them.

-That looks rather pretty.

-So on the morning of their arrival,

the day of their arrival, he would inspect every room to make sure

everything was in place.

Including the writing paper and the pens and the ink...

..and the telegram forms to send off telegrams,

as we had no telephones here.

Mr McIlhenny himself would have sent off several telegrams per day...

..to friends in London, or New York, or Philadelphia.

When the telephone did come here - in '62, I believe -

it was quite a nightmare to make a telephone call.

I rang up Henry, which at the time, was Church Hill 2-5,

was the telephone number. I remember this because trying to explain to a

New York operator that you want Church Hill 2-5, in Ireland, was...

..you know. I can remember distinctly, I said to her, "Church Hill 2-5."

"OK, yeah, what's the number?"

And I said, "Church Hill 2-5."

"Yeah, OK, what's the number?" And I said, "Church Hill 2-5."

And she said, "What are you talking about?"

And I said, "Well, what you do is,

"you call Dublin and then Dublin will get you into Sligo, then Sligo,

"Letterkenny, and then Letterkenny to..."

Church Hill, I guess, something like that.

So she thought I was joking, you know.

But anyway, we finally got through,

and it was in the old days when all the operators had the jack,

you know the thing? And every time they put a jack in,

the volume would be cut in half.

So by the time you got through to your number, you'd be screaming,

you know. And you wouldn't...

You'd forget about niceties like, "How are you and what's new?"

You know, you'd just get to the point.

The afternoon teas were sort of a big event in the afternoon,

at five o'clock. Everyone came back around 5pm, 5.30,

and have tea in the dining room.

And it was just, er, tea.

Mr McIlhenny would sort of pour the tea for everyone.

We set it up, just like a...

..buffet-type. Nelly would have fresh cakes every day.

The cakes were amazing.

Whether it was the coffee, the chocolate with the walnuts,

the lemon, the orange, the scones - sheer perfection.

The brown bread and the white bread.

The giant samovar, which I think is still there, which was, um,

truly a work of art.

And tea was a real ritual.

And he'd also invite local clergymen.

Whether it be the Church of Ireland, or the Presbyterian Minister,

or the Catholic priest.

He always said that Catholic priests were the most interesting because

they'd take a drink. One of them would ask for whiskey

to put in their tea!

He thought that was amusing.

And the dinners were part of the fun because he liked to put people

together where it would be interesting.

Lively.

And that took me years to figure out,

why do you keep inviting that person, or that person?

But they were very intelligent, but they were a little bit difficult.

It's because they made the dinner fun.

And people would talk about it and get prickly.

And so he really...

Maybe Glenveagh was his theatre.

Saturday night was always black-tie, if you had dinner there.

What Henry liked to do best was gather a group of people,

supply the venue for people to have fun and relax, away from reality.

Because it was like going to fantasyland when you were there.

He liked how different people were, and that sort of amused him.

Instead of the opposite,

where it's not that people had to behave perfectly,

it's that they had to contribute.

Even if contributing meant being a really bad guest.

Around the castle,

he created gardens that are regarded as some of the finest in Europe.

And inside, he set about creating a style that was both appropriate

and unique.

The entrance to Glenveagh Castle is surprisingly modest,

not the kind of imposing hall that you might expect.

The shell decorations, designed by the Kingsley Porters,

reflect the fact that Glenveagh was always a summer home for its owners.

Just off the hall is the music room,

where the Gordon tartan cloth wall covering not only improved the

room's acoustics, but also served as a reminder of the parallels between

Glenveagh and Balmoral.

Henry completely redecorated the drawing-room,

transforming it from a dark, Victorian billiard room

into something both formal, yet comfortable.

The rugs, which match the French 19th-century designs on the upholstery,

were specially woven for the castle in Killybegs.

The bright colours and rich textures are in sharp contrast to the rugged

scenery outside the windows.

Certainly, throughout the house here, the deer theme is obvious

in an artistic style, in an unusual way.

You don't find a Grand Hall here with stuffed stags' heads,

for example, you find another type of presentation of the deer theme.

I just decided that I would collect works of art that had deer in them,

because it made it more specialised and made it more amusing to have

deer paintings. And wild deer were scampering around on the hills

and roaring at the mating season, and so I just began

to buy things with deer in them.

I really do sincerely think that Landseer could be - and was,

a great many times - an extremely distinguished artist.

And I think now, after years and years and years of neglect,

people are really beginning to appreciate him at his best moments.

The original Landseers now hang in the Philadelphia Museum of Art,

where Joe Rishel, a friend and frequent guest to Glenveagh,

was a curator.

The remarkable thing that he was buying these pictures to be shown in

the house in Ireland, in Glenveagh.

And these two hung at both sides of a very long dining room.

You could actually hear these animals making these crashing noises

and making these horrible sort of "rumf", sort of slamming-in noises right there.

It was just magic.

Glenveagh would be typical of what was known as a deer forest

in Victorian times. And it would have been a common idea throughout

particularly the Highlands of Scotland,

and deer forests would have been primarily set up for deerstalking,

for the sport of deerstalking, and particularly stags.

And traditionally, in Victorian days,

that was a sport that took place in August, September,

with the focus on trophy heads, for example.

In other words, you know, fine sets of antlers on a big stag was the

objective really. The person really in charge of the day's stalking

would traditionally have been the head stalker.

In the case of Glenveagh, like most private deer forests,

there was a distinctive style of dress involved as well.

In the case of Glenveagh, it was a Tweed suit that was actually

designed here in Donegal.

Mr McIlhenny had it specially made and tailored, and so on.

So the head stalker and the under-stalkers

would be very distinctive, they'd be clearly identifiable

from other staff, like gardeners or whoever, as stalkers.

So there was a certain, if you like, hierarchy in that regard.

The day's stalking itself would involve

trekking out into the mountains,

being led by the head stalker, who would usually carry...

..the old-style telescope,

the brass telescope with the leather binding on it.

And they would glass, or spy, the hill from vantage points.

And the idea was to find a stag worthy of the stalk,

and preferably some distance away,

so that there was an effort involved in actually getting in close enough

for the guest to take a shot.

And then at the appropriate moment,

the stalker would hand the guests the rifle and advise them

where to aim for. And then, of course, the hard work starts,

and this is where the under-stalkers would come in.

And they would use a wooden pole tied across the antlers.

And one under-stalker would stand on each side and literally drag

the stag back to the castle and the deer larder.

So that was hard work.

So, you know, a day's stalking involved a lot of hiking,

a lot of bad weather,

wet, uncomfortable, cold conditions often, midges,

but the exhilaration - for the guest, anyway -

of bagging a good stag was worth it,

for the guest and the host's point of view.

And, of course, the head stalker had pride in his work as well.

The deer were placed in the deer larder adjacent to the castle.

The carcass would air-dry then in the chill room, erm,

and it would last much, much longer.

It would hang for maybe a month...

..before it would be used.

So it was very good quality venison at that stage.

If we were having dinner,

and we were having venison, which was Henry's, you know, the deer,

they used to cull the herd.

But he would never eat the venison.

He would always have a half a grapefruit on venison night

because he used to say, "My deer, it's like eating one of my pets!"

Entertaining on such a grand scale meant employing a large number of

staff. Paddy Gallagher first came to work at Glenveagh in 1954, aged 16.

He was to become Henry's butler for more than 30 years,

in both Donegal and Philadelphia.

My job was to take care of all the turf fires.

Start them in the morning about 7.30,

keep them alive and going all day, until about eight o'clock at night.

And also the oil lamps.

We didn't have any electricity in those days.

So we had about 45 lamps to...

..fill, and clean globes and trim wicks,

take them back to the little pantry where we stored them during the day.

All lamps were brought back, they weren't kept in the rooms.

When I got here in 1954,

there were 12 people in total connected to the house.

There was the head housekeeper...

..Mrs Whiteside, and her husband was the butler.

He was just known as Whiteside - you never used the first name

of the butler in those days.

Very English idea.

And the cook was Nelly, my sister, and three kitchen maids.

And then in the pantry, we had the butler and the two...

..under-butlers, first and second, and a parlour-maid.

And upstairs we had two chambermaids.

And the chauffeur. There were eight people who worked in the garden.

Matt Armour was the head gardener.

He was here for about 35 years

and he had seven helpers.

Busy growing the vegetables and trimming all the hedges around,

cutting the grass.

When the Adairs built the castle,

it was effectively in a very bleak location,

overlooking a very barren mountainside.

Because of the geology of the area, you have the lough,

which has a thermal effect on this area.

And you also have protection from the north,

because the lough runs in a north-east, south-west direction,

and we're on the southern bank of the lough.

The Adairs started planting vigorously and they started planting

shelter trees, obviously. So Scots pine went in, which are magnificent,

tall specimens, with a wonderful red bark on them, overlooking the lough.

So the whole southern bank of this lough now was clothed in trees.

And when you look north to the other hillside,

you see a complete barren mountain still.

So it's quite a remarkable transformation.

So they set up here and lived in the castle, came and went.

And then he died,

and then his wife Cornelia started developing the grounds.

So the first thing she did was develop an area of lawn,

which became, as we know today, the Pleasure Grounds.

And to achieve that, and because the area was so rugged and barren,

she imported hundreds of tonnes of soil to lay out that area of lawn,

which you still see today as part of the Pleasure Grounds.

And that was the beginning of doing things here,

in terms of cultivation and horticulture.

In Mrs Adair's time, there was a small area for vegetables and fruit.

But in McIlhenny's time, he started building walls

and created the Walled Garden as we see today.

When you look at the walls of the Walled Garden,

they look ancient because they're full of lichens and mosses,

liverworts and a lovely streel of herbage on them.

But it is only since Henry McIlhenny was here that he actually enclosed

the vegetable garden as a productive garden for the estate.

In those days, you couldn't find salad or any of that stuff.

You know, when I first came here...

Carrots, onions, cabbage, you know,

the usual vegetables that people grew in their gardens and whatever.

But things like lettuce and basil and asparagus and all those kind of

things just were not heard of.

Henry had them in his kitchen garden.

He grew all that stuff, you know.

So when you went there,

you were eating things that you wouldn't ordinary be able to go

to a shop to get.

What I loved most was walking with him, one-on-one,

through the gardens, the Pleasure Gardens in Glenveagh.

That was really nice.

He'd always be bundled up because he was always cold,

and he used to be in a full-length overcoat and a scarf, and a hat,

and gloves, and everything. But he had his secateurs, you see.

And we'd be walking along, and it was the most beautiful gardens,

the Pleasure Gardens, but he'd see a branch or something that bothered

him and he'd go, snip, like that.

And just cut this thing, you know, to make it perfect.

I don't know, I can't explain it in words,

it was just so nice to be with him.

Probably the most impressive area,

which is possibly the most plain and understated area,

is the Italian Garden.

It's a plain rectangle of grass, with a large pine in the middle,

and it's surrounded by busts of Roman gods and deities and emperors,

and it's just so elegant, understated, classical.

He brought in Lanning Roper,

the American landscape architect who had done a number of big commissions

in England for various big houses,

including Churchill's house, Chartwell.

And he also brought in James Russell, Jim Russell,

who was a nursery man and a garden designer.

So it seemed to be a very happy combination of Henry McIlhenny

as the owner, the wealthy owner, who had the money,

who could afford to do what the vision was for the place,

James Russell, who was the great plantsman and a garden designer,

who had a very good understanding of plants and what they needed and the

environment they required.

And Lanning Roper, with the architectural eye.

All around the garden, you'll see urns,

you'll see various embellishments of different kinds,

you see various statues.

There's quite an eclectic mixture of statues here.

When you walk into the Pleasure Grounds and walk around Glenveagh,

you can see that he had a painter's eye,

he had an art connoisseur's eye.

So it was just a natural thing for him to create a beautiful garden.

It was a landscape painting in its own right.

Henry's eye, his knack for spotting something special and unique,

served him well, both as a collector and, later,

as a curator for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Henry McIlhenny purchased this painting when he was 24 years old.

He'd actually been eyeing it for a while at a couple of dealers and had

always kind of baulked at the price.

But eventually, in 1934, was able to either convince his mother,

or to find the funds - 35,000 - to acquire the portrait.

Delphine Legrand, she was the daughter of an art dealer known to Renoir.

Renoir, at this stage, was having a hard time getting...

selling a lot of his paintings,

and so he took on a number of portrait commissions for many of his

friends, which is what he did with the Legrand family.

As you can see in the portrait, she's sort of slightly hesitant,

a little bit uncertain. She's kind of looking to someone, you know,

off to the side, maybe her mother or father,

for a little bit of encouragement.

But for Renoir, in his hands, you know, he was a great master at colour.

And so you can see this kind of tension between her black pinafore,

sort of white sleeves that actually,

when you look closely at the painting,

are worked out in sort of brilliant sort of blue and purple highlights.

Particularly in this period, in 1875,

there was famously an auction of Impressionist paintings,

in which the frames on the canvases were actually more valuable than the

paintings at the time.

So it is startling to think,

even striking to think that Henry McIlhenny purchased this for 35,000

in 1934.

So prices that are sort of unfathomable today.

In the '30s,

there was a terrific possibility to buy good examples by these artists

because they were simply available and on the market.

I was in Paris with some Harvard classmates the year I graduated

and I went to a dealer called Arnold Seligmann,

who showed me this picture.

And, of course, I was wild to have it.

And, if you can believe it, they sent it on approval.

It's a magnificent coup in terms of Henry McIlhenny's collection.

But a very telling one, I think,

in terms of when you look at the collection overall,

he never buys ordinary pictures.

And this is not an ordinary Toulouse-Lautrec, by any sense -

it's thought to be one of his greatest paintings ever.

So I think it certainly shows, you know,

Henry's training as an art historian, his great eye,

so that when he stumbled upon this picture,

he recognised immediately that it was a very great Toulouse-Lautrec

and he had to have it.

That woman who's dancing is meant to be La Goulue.

And then the man is called Valentin le Desosse,

cos he was so limber, it looked as though he had no bones.

And they were famous dancers in that period.

We know from a pencil inscription made by Toulouse-Lautrec that he

describes this scene as Valentin le Desosse,

which is the man with the sort of very nimble,

flexible body to the left.

He's teaching one of the new ones how to dance.

So, actually, what we're seeing here,

at least according to Toulouse-Lautrec's pencil notation,

is just one of the dancers being instructed in a new dance.

-HENRY:

-I think the woman is magnificent in the pink dress.

And the odd thing is that nobody knows who she was.

She's completely anonymous, which is strange.

I'm always struck by how she's wearing a hat and she seems to be

dressed for the outdoors.

I will say that there's a recent theory that she may, in fact,

be a prostitute and that this is sort of a woman of the night who's

perhaps trawling, looking for clients.

Because most of the figures in this painting are men -

the few other female figures appear to be dancers.

In 1934, the year that Henry had first visited Glenveagh,

he had been appointed Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts

at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In 1936,

he organised a major international exhibition of works by Degas,

one of his own favourite artists.

Henry McIlhenny loved Degas.

And there's always something, a little bit...

Something always has a little bit of an edge, I think,

to McIlhenny's taste, and this certainly fits that,

in that sort of sense that she has a tendency to make people a little

uncomfortable - is she a girl?

Is she, you know, growing into an older, sort of, a woman?

And that has that sort of sense of edge.

Not to mention the fact that she is also partially clothed.

And so visitors are used to seeing bronze sculptures,

but not ones that have these tutus,

albeit this tutu is a little worn and discoloured.

Many of the guests who have visited Glenveagh reflected Henry's passion

for the arts. And some of them liked Donegal so much,

they moved there permanently.

One such was the artist Derek Hill.

Derek Hill was the artistic director of the British School in Rome

in the late '40s.

And he met Henry McIlhenny,

was working in the American School in Rome at the same time.

They became friends, and Derek was invited to Glenveagh,

I think in 1949, originally.

So he would have come that summer for a couple of weeks,

and liked the place.

And he came back every year for three or four years,

and eventually bought St Columb's and moved here more permanently.

Well, as an artist, I suppose Donegal was very attractive because

it's beautiful, and particularly during the summer,

we have very long days, with very interesting light.

So it really suited his style as a painter.

He painted quite quickly, so he could go out and capture it very quickly.

It suited him. And I think that's initially what drew him here.

But he really fell in love with the place and the people,

and would've regarded this as his home once he did actually move here.

Derek used to like to be by himself, you know.

He would go off to Tory Island and live in a stone hut.

And, you know, sleep on the floor, and paint rocks.

He came to Donegal to paint the landscape,

so we have a good collection of his Donegal landscapes,

and particularly of his Tory Island work.

That's what people really associate with Derek Hill, is Tory Island,

and his paintings on Tory,

and the Tory Island artists that he sort of fostered and encouraged.

As a collector, he was really interesting,

because artists collect differently from collectors.

So he and Henry McIlhenny were very different in that respect.

Henry would have, like a proper collector does,

Henry would've researched the subject,

and collected the very best examples of whatever he set out to collect.

It would've been, you know, a deliberate thing,

whereas artists tend to collect things that inform them.

So almost like magpies,

they just pick up things that they think might be useful to them.

Well, they were always competing with one another.

So you see, Derek had one up on Henry, because he was

an artist of some note.

Henry, for that reason, was slightly jealous.

I think he was inclined to try and, sort of,

take Derek down a peg every now and again.

Derek, likewise, was always trying to sort of pull one up on Henry.

Henry didn't like Art Nouveau, and Derek loved Art Nouveau.

His whole house was William Morris, and you know, that whole period.

And he had bought a Tiffany lamp, which he had in the dining room,

and Henry was going to lunch there one day,

and Derek said, "Hold on, you have to see my Tiffany lamp,

"my new Tiffany lamp."

So Henry peeked in, he saw the Tiffany lamp on the sidewalk,

and Derek said, "So, what do you think?

And he said, "Well, my dear, it's perfectly hideous,

"but it goes so well with the rest of the room."

When Sean Lemass went to the United States in the late '60s

when he was Taoiseach, and went on a tour of the National Parks,

they asked him...

..what he was doing about preserving land in Ireland, and he said,

"We're doing absolutely nothing about it."

So when he returned from his trip to the United States,

he decided to talk to his ministers and see what they would do

about land preservation, especially in the west of Ireland,

where there was more vacant land.

In the 1970s,

Henry entered into negotiations with the Irish government to sell most of

his land, the first step towards creating a National Park.

The state acquired 29,000 acres for a modest price,

and took on the responsibility of employing the estate workers.

Henry retained the castle and garden,

and continued to employ the domestic staff and gardeners.

I always found he was interested to know what was going on.

He was interested to know what sort of work was being undertaken,

were there surveys of plants or animals going on, and why, and how.

I think he had a genuine interest in the handover, if you like,

and the idea of a National Park.

But at the same time as the negotiations between Henry

and the Irish Government were going on,

the IRA was intensifying its fight against the British Government.

Glenveagh's isolation offered no protection against the Troubles.

Because of the Troubles, he couldn't get anybody to come.

People were afraid to come to visit.

And you couldn't expect not to have some sort of a backlash,

cos my place was so near the border, only 35 miles from Londonderry,

and from Strabane,

there seems to be constant friction and horror going on.

I think there was a real threat on him.

If they kidnapped him, they would demand a huge ransom.

But it didn't deter him from coming, he still came.

But I think he was nervous towards the end.

The guards used to come out and spend time

out at Glenveagh at night.

Because they sort of had information that Glenveagh was going to be

in for a raid of pictures and whatever.

Special Branch - a vanguard were there waiting

with their sub-machineguns.

I remember that well.

I just felt the time had come...

..to leave Ireland, not only because of the Troubles.

Then Ireland became extremely costly to run,

and I was getting older,

and the climate's rather terrible, rains too much and it's too cold,

and too damp.

And I just thought the moment had come to make a break.

He realised, like we all do, that he was getting old,

and he couldn't go on living this kind of lifestyle indefinitely.

Well, of course, he left that year on August 15, 1983.

He had guests up to the very last minute.

In fact, we had more guests in 1983 than in any year that I remember.

So everyone wanted to come for one last time.

Very sad to cut his links with Glenveagh.

He loved the place.

We just felt that he was, sort of, losing part of himself,

leaving it behind.

I think he wanted to leave a legacy,

some kind of atonement for the terrible evictions that took place

in Derryveagh in the 1860s.

If Glenveagh had not been designated as a National Park back in the late

1970s, we would have a much more fragmented landscape.

And almost certainly, we would have other land uses, like quarrying,

like wind farms, like forestry, perhaps housing.

The idea of a National Park here in Glenveagh

has been greatly beneficial to the region,

and to the national good, the common good.

We sometimes forget that there are individuals, like McIlhenny,

who leave a great legacy in the world,

and his family leaves a great legacy in the world,

and we need to understand more about them,

because without understanding about McIlhenny,

we don't actually understand the full Ulster-Scots story.

You look at all the places he could've gone -

it's very intriguing that he comes back to Donegal.

He comes back to a place very,

very close to where his ancestors in the 19th-century had actually lived.

Henry McIlhenny's grandfather left Donegal in 1843, aged 13.

America offered emigrants a chance to make a completely new life,

and in Henry's grandfather's case, to create huge wealth.

The Ulster-Scots tradition of giving back to society through good works

and philanthropy was something the McIlhenny family believed in.

Philadelphia and Ireland have both benefited greatly from Henry's

generosity, which has ensured that many people can enjoy fabulous works

of art, and some of the most spectacular landscapes and gardens

in the world.