Context 163 - March 2020

22 C O N T E X T 1 6 3 : M A R C H 2 0 2 0 Opposite: The ruined Nuns’ Church, set apart from the main monastic enclosure at Clonmacnoise, with its reconstructed west doorway and chancel arch (Photo: Rob Hurson, Wikimedia) Society – decided instead to write a critical but useful book, The Preservation and Restoration of Ancient Monuments (1852), published by his OAS colleague John Henry Parker (1806–84). In it Freeman stated: ‘I believe Mr Ruskin stands absolutely alone in his extreme and chimerical view of rejecting all restoration’. Curiously, the practice of differentiating replacement stones had been in use in Ireland since the restoration of a section of the Rock of Cashel, Co Tipperary in 1848/49. We might examine how this came about. The work was supervised by the archdeacon, the English-born Rev Henry Cotton MRIA (1789– 1879), who was a noted historian, educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, before serving as sub-librarian at the Bodleian in 1814–22. Significantly, the principles of minimum intervention he espoused for the project completely accord with modern practice and indeed predate the earliest conservation work of Cotton’s friend the Rev James Graves (1815–86) by almost a decade. The work, necessitated by the catastrophic collapse in February 1848 of the entrance door- way to the cathedral and the roofless medieval palace overhead, was the subject of a pamphlet issued by Cotton three months later. In seek- ing donations, he drew particular attention to his proposed methodology, stating: ‘The Lord Bishop of Cashel has expressed his wish that an endeavour should be made not at restoration (a hazardous attempt in these days of almost uni- versal desire to dabble in architectural improve- ments), but at judicious repair , so as to prevent further damage’. Among the handful of trustees nominated by Cotton to receive donations for the project was John Henry Parker of Oxford. Cotton’s placing of the words ‘restoration’ and ‘repair’ in italics suggests a familiarity with the debate in England and he was probably advised by Parker on methodology from the outset. A guidebook of 1888 noted that: ‘The cut stone archway over the door was very much injured; but each stone was carefully restored to its place… three new stones being only supplied; half the porch had to be then restored, and it was carefully done’. These interventions are still distinguish- able on close examination today, both in the vaulted ceiling of the porch and in the jambs of the doorcase, where the aforementioned three stones are carved in such a way as to contrast with the reused blocks. The damage to the reinstated voussoirs is also evident, many of the arrises being chipped from the collapse but not repaired. The best-known example of early progres- sive conservation in Ireland occurred in the 1860s at the monastic site of Clonmacnoise, Co Offaly, where the works carried out by the Kilkenny and South East Archaeological Society (KAS), progenitor of the Royal Society of the Antiquaries of Ireland, under the direction of its honorary secretary James Graves, also accorded with modern principles. Graves was the rector of Ennisnag, a small country parish, but also the treasurer of the medieval cathedral of St Canice, of which he had written a history. In the decades after Catholic Emancipation in 1829, Clonmacnoise and the Rock of Cashel, the crown jewels of Irish ecclesiastical patrimony, associated with the kings of Munster, became the particular objects of renewed scholarly inter- est, but also of a revived debate over contested ownership, given that they had been in the hands of the Church of Ireland since the Reformation. Graves’ work at Clonmacnoise, although originallymooted in the 1850s when he researched the site, was started in 1865 as a direct response to an act of vandalism at one of its chapels, Temple Finghin, in 1864 by a party of Catholic zealots fromBirr. Legal proceedings were initiated against the perpetrators by the rector the Rev Charles Alexander Vignoles, with the support of the local Catholic curate, the Rev Patrick Young. From his prior investigation of historic documents and discussions with antiquaries, Graves envisaged that any conservation work he would carry out at Clonmacnoise would be well-informed, while his repairs toTemple Finghin (1867), and the nearby Nuns’ Church (1865), which was on private property, would also respect local sensibilities by being carried out in an exemplary way, including minimum intervention. Keith Emerick has written of Graves’ conser- vation of the Nuns’ Church: ‘The importance of this work, and its place in the philosophy of repair, should not be underestimated’. 1 However, it would appear that Graves’ conser- vation philosophy was not sui generis , as his own writings implied, but particularly informed by his personal engagement with English antiquar- ies. From the early 1850s the KAS was exchang- ing its journals with allied British societies, including the Oxford Architectural Society, and Graves built up a network of correspondents. By his own account, he met many of them for the first time when, with the Irish antiquary Lord Dunraven, he attended a congress of the Cambrian Archaeological Society in Truro in August 1862. Freeman and Parker were certainly there, listed among the speakers, but as both had studied Irish antiquities it was probably more a case of renewing acquaint- ances, and Graves subsequently received an invitation to visit Freeman in Somerset. In May 1863, after Thomas Newenham Deane had been appointed architect for the restoration of St Canice’s, Graves, as treasurer, persuaded the dean and chapter that, rather than sign off or comment on the submitted proposals, which Reference 1 Emerick, K (2003) ‘Whitby and Clonmacnoise’ in Heather A King (ed), Clonmacnoise Studies, Volume 2, Seminar Papers 1998, Stationery Office, Dublin