Desmond Fitzgerald revisits a fine 18th-century mansion known to him in his youth and elaborates on its remarkable preservation of original detail and content
Tarbert House provokes many memories for me having known it from early childhood. During the War years, owing to the scarcity of petrol, my mother used to drive me the four miles or so to take tea with the Leslies in a pony and trap. The Leslies were our nearest neighbours and I remember Cecil, an austere ex-army officer and his sisters Theo and May. Theo, the lively one, was my mother’s great friend and solace in those often lonely times, and she used to play spillikins with me on the floor of the drawing room looking down through the Scots pines, framed by oak trees, to the sparkling river Shannon with the distant Clare hills beyond
