Swainstown

Nathaniel Preston, the younger son of an alderman of Dublin who had acquired estates in Meath at the Restoration, was born in 1678 and was MP for Navan for 47 years. He married Anne Dawson, a niece of the developer of Dublin’s Dawson Street, and completed his house at Swainstown around 1750, just as his brother was completing the larger and grander Bellinter about 10 miles off. Thus there has always been speculation that the German-Irish architect Richard Castle also had a hand in this house, as both are symmetrical over-basement blocks joined to matching pavilions by curved quadrants. There remains some debate about this, however. The main doorcase, which is quite tall and narrow for the façade, is surmounted by a swan-neck pediment that seems to have been rescued from a building of the 1720s. The arrangement of rooms is unusual, yet in a way Preston succeeded in his aims, for, unlike many other Irish houses, Swainstown is still the home of his descendants, successively soldiers or clerics and mainly called Arthur or Nathaniel. They still farm their ancestral lands, looking out over their tree-lined demesne from a fine mid-18th century house on a gentle eminence.