Alfred Haughton of Ardreigh House

Almost 35 years ago while working on the restoration of Ardreigh House as a family home workmen came across the names of what I assumed were the original men who had built the house. Those men wrote their names on floor joists between the basement and the first floor with the year 1850. This led me to believe that just a year after the Great Famine that left over one million Irish dead Alfred Haughton, a Quaker from Carlow, had built the house on the site of the medieval Ardreigh Castle overlooking the deserted medieval village of Ardreigh. Alfred Haughton also wrote his name on the wall of what was later to be the dining room before he had it decorated with favoured Victorian wallpaper of the time. Alfred was a son of Samuel Haughton and his third wife, Henrietta Osborne. The Haughton family were mill owners in Carlow and I have always assumed that the Ardreigh Mill which Ardreigh House overlooked was built the same time as the house. However, some notes written by Alfred Haughton in 1835 raised the question of whether the Ardreigh Mill, and indeed Ardreigh House, was built much earlier than the 1850s. A directory for Athy in 1846 showed amongst the ‘nobility, gentry and clergy’ Alfred Haughton of Ardreigh. This might tend to support the belief that both the mill and the house were built earlier than I had originally thought. 1835 was an eventful year for the Haughtons as recorded by Alfred in his review of the year. Just six years previously ‘an Act for the relief of his Majesty’s Roman Catholic subjects’ was passed in the Westminster Parliament and having received the Royal assent allowed Catholics to enter Parliament and have access to a variety of State and military positions. The Royal Commission of Enquiry, established in 1833 under the Chairmanship of the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, reported two years later that upwards of 75% of the labourers in Ireland were without regular employment. Three years later the Athy Literary Magazine carried a letter which claimed that Athy had ‘able bodied labourers at our corners, hoards of beggars at our doors, disease and famine in the hovels of the poor’. Athy was a town where wealth and abject poverty lived side by side and the Peace Preservation Force of the time would have had little impact on crime prevention. Was it to protect those inside houses such as Ardreigh House that windows were provided with strong wooden window shutters with iron bars to keep the shutters closed from the inside? Alfred Haughton in his 1835 writing refers to an intrusion into his home in Ardreigh. ‘In the spring of the year a ruffian came into my house at night and would have killed me but the Omnipotent enabled me to trust in him and gave me courage and firmness.’ The intruder was later identified as local Athy man Henry Rainsford whom the local newspapers reported was charged and convicted on 9th July 1835 at the Kildare assizes. He was sentenced to death by hanging. Later the death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. Henry Rainsford was transported to New South Wales, Australia on the ship ‘Hive’ which left Cobh on 24th August 1835 with 250 convicts on board. He left behind his wife Bridget and two children, Elizabeth aged 4 years and John, a one-year-old baby. The ship ran aground when entering Jervis Bay south of Sydney during the night of December 9th after a journey of almost three and a half months. With the loss of one crew member the rest of the crew and the convicts reached the shore and eventually arrived at their destination in New South Wales on Christmas Eve. Today Ardreigh House still has the original window shutters and the iron bars which were not sufficient to protect Alfred Haughton 189 years ago. Even closer to our time Ardreigh House, like several other similar houses in South Kildare, was raided for arms by the I.R.A. during the War of Independence. Alfred Haughton died in 1858 and Ardreigh Mill and Ardreigh House were subsequently purchased by the Hannon family who like the Haughtons were mill owners in Carlow and elsewhere. What happened Henry Rainsford I do not yet know but the story of his wife Bridget and his two young children who were left behind in Athy will hopefully be told at another time.