moore hall

George Moore may have spent the most exciting years of his life in Paris and London but he was born and lived his early life in one of the remotest parts of the west of Ireland, County Mayo, where the Moores had lived for at least six generations before him. The Moores claimed descent from Sir Thomas Moore, Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII and author of Utopia, and the family settled first at Ashbrook House near Ballyvary, later moving to the environs of Ballyglass. Here, at the close of the eighteenth century, the writer's great-grandfather, another George Moore, built himself a Georgian Mansion with the fortune he had amassed in the Spanish town of Alicante. 'I have travelled far but have seen nothing as beautiful as Lough Carra,' he declared when installed in Moore Hall, a fine three-storied house with a basement below and an immense circular gravelsweep in front of the main door. Inside, the hall had an Adam ceiling and contained a huge iron chest, supposed by successive generations of Moore children to be filled with Sapnish gold. Overhead was the summer room with a balcony looking out over the lake. As with all great houses of the time, Moore Hall had a chapel, greenhouses, bakery, laundry, blacksmith's forge and extensive servants' quarters.