Bushy Park House: Ivy Clad
Bushy Park House: Ivy Clad
Thank you so much to my mother, Helga Weiss Mullins, for supplying me with this picture of Bushy Park House. The photograph of the house, covered in ivy, comes from her own personal collection. This is what the house would have looked like when she arrived from Germany in 1946 and, indeed, it retained that facade well into the 1960’s. Eventually my father , Larry, decided that the ivy had to go because it could cause structural problems with the building.
Tractor Pulling
My mother once told me the hilarious story about the day the ivy met its’ end. Larry, on the tractor, tugging at that ivy with with all the strength he could muster, his muscles tightened and sweat dripping from his face. And Helga, eyes glued to the scene in frozen horror, convinced that the entire building was about to collapse. Thankfully, it all ended well. The ivy had been removed and the old house didn’t suffer any harm from its’ intensive face lift.
Attachment
The house was inhabited up to a few years ago and was always a place full of life and energy. And now it still stands strong, this beautiful historical building, just a stone’s throw away from modernity. As always, I feel its’ pull and it draws me to it in a way that I cannot easily explain. Is it the history, the heritage, the memories? Is it the house itself, standing proud and peaceful in the lovely rural countryside of Roscommon? All I know is that the attachment is very strong, uplifting and inspiring.
Bushy Park House: 2018
On a recent trip home, I decided that it was about time to add some current photographs to the older Bushy Park House collection. So, camera in hand, I set off down the tree lined avenue and hoped that I could capture the spirit of the place. One of the things that struck me was that the ivy was starting to grow back once more. It was almost a feeling of poetic justice. To me, the house looks just as beautiful now as it did in the days of old.
Links
If you click on the image, you can see a larger version.
Read the background to Bushy Park House here.
Historical Records here