Farmhill House

Walled garden, extant 1838, on a skewed rectangular plan with boundary wall to perimeter. Now disused. Set in grounds originally shared with Farmhill House.

A walled garden surviving as an interesting relic of the Farmhill House estate following the demolition (1950) of the eponymous country house (1780) occupied by the notorious Harriet Gardiner (1821-92) who was described as 'a weird and grotesque figure and a baneful one [who] will long be remembered in County Mayo not alone for her semi-masculine attire and her repulsively eccentric ways but for the Pharaoh-like and utterly unfeminine hardness of heart which she exhibited for years towards a miserable and poverty stricken tenantry' (The Connaught Telegraph). Her companion, Susan "Susannah" Pringle (1826-1910), was equally vilified for her complicity in the evictions of tenants and the appearance of the pair at one particular court session was the subject of a scathing letter to "The Connaught Telegraph", believed to be from James Daly (1838-1911) writing under the pseudonym "O'Beirne", who vividly recounted: 'The Pringle hag kept, jack-in-the-box like, jumping up and down in her seat the whole time, grinning and working her worn out chops, much after the fashion of a Cheshire cat mumbling at sour cheese. This whole time the Gardiner hag seemed to be just recovering from a fit of somnolence [but] perhaps she was suffering from the want of the "hair" from "the dog" that had bittern her the previous night of early that same morning' (The Connaught Telegraph).