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Strokestown Park House (April-Oct daily 11am-5.30pm) is a graceful Georgian residence designed by Richard Castle on a plan - a central block with two side wings linked by curved arms - whose adaptability as a sort of glorified farmhouse ensures that it turns up again and again throughout Ireland. Sold by the family of the original owners to the local garage in 1979, the house has never gone through an auction and therefore retains everything from furniture to papers relating to the Famine and 1930s school exercise books. The house (GBP3.25/?4.12) makes a good place to get to grips with the Anglo-Irish tradition. Its story is a fairly typical one. Originally a massive 27,000 acres, the estate was granted to one Nicholas Mahon in reward for his support of the House of Stuart during the English Civil War. The original building, finished around 1696, was fortified but not particularly grand; only one room of it survives, the stillroom in the cellar. As the family became richer and more secure, it made more grandiose additions, and the current house dates essentially from the 1730s, with some early nineteenth-century alterations. In the mid-nineteenth century Major Denis Mahon, who was a particularly nasty piece of work, is believed to have been one of the first landowners to charter less-than-seaworthy vessels (the notorious coffin ships ) to take evicted tenants to America during the Famine. His activities were reported and censured in contemporary newspapers both in Ireland and abroad. In 1847 he was shot dead on his own estate. To give a measure of the interconnectedness of Anglo-Irish society even in comparatively recent times, the lady who sold the house to the garage, the redoubtable Mrs Olive Hales Pakenham-Mahon, married the heir to the Rockingham Estate in 1914, thus uniting the two biggest estates in Roscommon, though the land empire set up by this dynastic marriage ceased to exist very soon afterwards, as did the marriage: the Rockingham heir was killed at the front in the first few days of fighting of World War I. Also in the house, in one of the upstairs bedrooms, is a painting of horses and stooks of corn by Woodbrook's Phoebe Kirkwood . The interior of the house gives off a feeling of very comfortable living, but not extraordinary opulence; there's a relaxed living room, and a spacious library and dining room, while upstairs you can see the old schoolroom, complete with desks, blackboard and school-books. One of its really extraordinary features is a gallery that runs the length of the kitchen, allowing the lady of the house to watch what was happening there without having to venture in; on Monday mornings she would drop the week's menu down from above. The Irish Famine Museum (GBP3/?3.81, combined house and museum ticket GBP6/?7.62) in the stableyards of the Strokestown Estate provides a provocative interpretation of the house and its history and explores wider issues of Famine migration, emigration and oppression in a historical context, aiming, in particular, to break the traumatic silence that surrounds the subject. In 1945, a century after the terrible events, the Irish Folklore Commission noted: I am sorry that this is such a meagre account of what was a dreadful period; but there seems to be very little information or interest left in the minds of the old people about that time. Indeed, it seems there was a sort of conspiracy of silence on the part of their mothers and fathers about it all. Informed by a sense of outrage at the attitudes, on the part of the British government and landlords, that allowed this terrible disaster to happen, the exhibition follows the harrowing story of the Famine, juxtaposing it with images of Ascendancy luxury and of present-day famine and emigration. In 1841, Ireland was the most densely populated country in Europe, with a vigorous trading and commercial life. The exhibition shows the tragic results of over-reliance on the potato, which had been introduced into the country in the early eighteenth century; by the 1840s, it was the staple diet of the population. Blight arrived in Ireland in October 1845. In a letter to the British Secretary of the Treasury, a contemporary eyewitness surveyed the devastation: On the 27th of last month I passed from Cork to Dublin and this doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of abundant harvest. Returning on the third instant I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation. In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly the destruction that has left them foodless. The exhibition traces the poverty and hard-heartedness of the Whig government's laissez faire economic response to the crisis. Its callousness in the face of human suffering on a massive scale - as well as its attitude to Irish ways of life - is indicated by Trevelyan's response, as the famine deepened: The great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the [Irish] people. The government resolved to make no official intervention to hinder the operation of private enterprise: relief food imports were stopped. Between 1841 and 1851, about 1.4 million Irish people died and another 1.4 million people emigrated - figures almost entirely attributable to the Famine. The house and museum - plus a walled garden (GBP2.50/?3.17, combined ticket for all three GBP8.50/?10.79) with a spectacular herbaceous border - are geared for group visits, but it can still be a thought-provoking experience, particularly if you arrive between busloads
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