Tiermaclane House

Tiermaclane House
Eric Shaw
Tiermaclane House

Tiermaclane House

Associated families, etc.

Woulfe, Carrig

Townland

Teerrnaclane (Clondegad)

Location

W of the Kildysert road, 6 km SSW of Ennis

Present condition `

House: Ruined. Walls standing.

Demesne: A few mature trees. Original avenue now a public thoroughfare. Yard buildings standing and used. Garden walls standing.

Features

Tiermaclane was a large, early eighteenth-century, two-storey, five bay, hip-roofed house, with a central Venetian style fan and side lit stone doorcase. An identical doorcase is similarly situated to the rear. Cut stone quoins and block and start window dressing embellish this delightful stone building with its brick cornice. It faced west with a yard and utility buildings adjoining the south and south-west end. There was originally a long tree-lined avenue from the main road. A vast walled garden or orchard still stands some distance to the south-west of the house on the far side of the avenue.

History

Tiermaclane was obtained from Henry, 7th Earl of Thomond, by Nicholas Woulfe Esq. in 1684. The Woulfes appeared in Limerick records in Plantagenet times. Thomas Woulfe Esq. of Ballyphillip, County Limerick, married Mary Creagh, Their son, Thomas Woulfe, was Sheriff of Limerick in 1470. His descendant, Stephen Woulfe Esq of Crenagh, County Clare, who married a daughter of Limerick Mayor Thomas Stritch, or Fitzpatrick, was Nicholas’ father. Stephen‘s son, Patrick Woulfe of Ennis married Mary Fitzgerald of Gortmore (qv). His heir, Nicholas Woulfe, had three sons and four daughters. He died in 1726. One of his great-grandsons was Peter Woulfe Esq. of Tiermaclane, who went to Madrid, where he already had kinsfolk living, when he was  fifteen. ln 1747 he visited Paris, where he became a leading student of geology and allied sciences, He collected fossils, and was  tutored by the celebrated Dr Rouelle. Having been invited to London in 1752, he was appointed Surgeon General of Guadaloupe. On his return, Lord Bute and other nobles employed him to enlarge and arrange their collections of natural curiosities. Reputedly the earliest chemist and naturalist in Europe, he visited mines in Germany and France. In 1768, the Royal Society presented him with their gold medal (Fitzgerald’s History of Limerick) The great-great-grandson  of Nicholas Woulfe succeeded the Rt. Hon. Henry Joy as Chief  Baron of the Court of Exchequer of Ireland in 1838. In 1878, the Baron’s son Stephen Rowland Woulfe, J.P., (High Sheriff in 1876) , late 7th Foot and Captain of the Huntingdon Militia, of Tiermaclane, owned one thousand and nineteen acres (rateable valuation £882) in County Clare. He also owned Strangford House in County Down, of which county he was he was High Sheriff in 1874, He married twice. His first wife, Isabella, was a daughter of Thomas the second Lord Graves. By his second wife, Alice Blackburn,   he had two children. Stephen died in 1888 aged five year-5 and Hilda Maud, who was born in 1882, lived in Kensington,  London. Baron Woulfe’s sister Joanna, married (1813)) Terence Flanagan of County Roscommon whose family adopted the additional name and became the Woulfe Flanagans of Rathfudagh. Tiermaclane was in ruins in 1840. Possibly had been damaged by fire.

 

Weir, Hugh, W. L. Houses of Clare, Ballinakella Press, 1985

With kind permission of the author.

 

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