Hardly anyone has heard of a lovely little village called Whitestown. It happens to be in Co Louth, tucked away at the edge of the Irish Sea on the nether end of the Cooley peninsula, a short drive from Greenore. It's also an example of a "clachan", the ancient, informal type of Irish village.
Philip Geoghegan, lecturer in architecture at UCD and national chairman of An Taisce, came across it by chance while he was researching a book of design guidelines, Building Sen- sitively in County Louth. And he admits to being "enchanted by this original and beautiful clachan village" on the road to nowhere.
Work on the book is nearing completion, and Mr Geoghegan has made a point of including a mini-study of the village to show how successfully a grouping of houses can work. "I hope it will draw attention to the unique qualities of the village and its remarkable buildings," he says. But he also warns that vigilance will be needed to protect it.
Remote as it is, Whitestown is undergoing social change. Dr Andrew McDonald, a semiretired GP now based in Greenore, reckons that he is one of the few indigenous people of Whitestown who still have house in the village. Most of the rest are mainly occupied by outsiders as second homes.
Heaps of rubble
At one time, the village would have had 65 family houses and a population of well over 300. But not any more. Some of the original houses have long since been reduced to heaps of rubble, overgrown by weeds, though Dr McDonald says he could tell a story about every one of them.
He points to the small whitewashed building that used to be the forge and to the former carpenter's shop opposite, with its whitewashed house and barn behind, all now uninhabited. But at least Lily Finnegan's charming little pub, its forecourt paved with pebbles, still does a good trade, especially at night. "The abandoned buildings here should all be restored, to give visitors an idea of what life in this village was like 50 years ago," he says. "But what will happen here if we're not very careful is that Whitestown will become a modern type of village, populated almost entirely by outsiders."
A group of houses and outbuildings, derelict for 30 years or more, are now being "refurbished" and marketed as "a unique development of four quality individual renovated stone buildings", according to Laurence Gunne's auctioneer's sign. And they have all been sold at prices ranging from £70,000 to £120,000. Like all the other houses in Whitestown, they had been lime-plastered and whitewashed. But now they have been stripped back to the raw rubble stone, leaving them completely out of keeping with their context. For the truth is that rubble stone was never meant to be exposed.
Dr McDonald drew this to the attention of Paddy Shaffrey, who with his late, greatlymissed wife Maura, has done more than most to promote Ireland's vernacular architecture, and he was "disgusted" by what he saw. He also asked the Heritage Council to intervene, but to no avail - so far, at least.
The contrast between this botched development in Whitestown and the recent renovation of a small clachan called Hannah's Close, near Kilkeel, Co Down, could not be more pronounced. There, six houses have been sensitively restored by Dawson Stelfox, of Everest fame, for letting to visitors.
Old fabric
Mr Stelfox is a committed conservation architect with Consarc in Belfast; the contemporary arm of the firm has designed the city's Odyssey millennium project. He strongly believes in working with, rather than against, the fabric of old buildings - and that shows in his fine work at Hannah's Close. Whitestown deserves similar care. But Dr McDonald believes it has become the latest victim of a trend which has led to the "discovery" of the Cooley peninsula, and its colonisation for holiday homes. Not surprisingly, being so close to the Border, it has become a particular magnet for Northerners.
The broadcaster Nick Coffey, who has roots in the area and a cosy home in Whitestown, within easy reach of both Belfast and Dublin, says "you wouldn't get a shed in Carlingford these days for less than £100,000." Three sites, with planning permission for new houses, recently sold for £60,000 apiece.
Since Bord Failte designated Carlingford as a heritage town less than a decade ago, and its Church of Ireland church was renovated as an arts and crafts centre, some £2 million worth of private investment has flowed into the place, creating such new facilities such as a riding school and a cookery school.
"Smell greed"
But some people have their doubts. "When you get out of your car in Carlingford now, you can smell greed in the air," Mr Coffey says. "Every little nook and cranny in the place is spoken for and the prices are way beyond the reach of native sons and daughters. It's the Klondyke mentality, I suppose."
It was, of course, our relative poverty that preserved old Ireland for so long. We simply couldn't afford to renovate, let alone replace, venerable houses in villages like Whitestown - or even in the Hibernian metropolis itself. Now that we have loads of money, everywhere is getting it in the gut.
Nobody would argue that people nowadays should live in authentic squalor and decrepitude. Dr McDonald himself has a fitted kitchen in his beautifully kept thatched cottage in Whitestown as well as a proper bathroom and other modern conveniences, all of which were installed sympathetically. Why should anyone be without such things, however old the house?
What is extraordinary, however, is the level of butchery many of us are prepared to employ in the cause of converting or extending old houses to make them fit our needs. The current PVC plague is the most obvious manifestation of this mania.
Is it not time that we began to act as custodians, rather than capricious masters, of Ireland's architectural heritage?