Terence Reeves-Smyth revisits Castle Ward, Co Down, famous for its contrasting Rococo-Gothick and Palladian styles
The rising popularity of Rococo-Gothick from the mid-18th century was greeted with suspicion, if not outright hostility by many of the ruling Whig establishment. Promoted by free-thinking aristocrats, such as Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, the style was seen by its detractors as a whimsy of the picturesque and a subversive decorative language that threatened to contaminate the principles of Palladian constructional regularity and the classical ideals of repose, sobriety and discipline.
