Students plan Cluedo game for Fota House

“EEEUUUUGHH!”

“Yuck!”

Not the delightful screams you might expect from 20 girls if you’re trying to engage them in learning.

But the teenagers in question were happy all the same to chance touching the stuffed pheasant, rabbit and duck hanging from the wooden carousel next to the kitchen of Fota House, near Cobh in Co Cork.

The Smith-Barry family, who owned the home from the 18th century until 1975, are said to have had a taste for woodcock-on-toast, and it was in these quarters that such ‘delicacies’ were prepared by their servants.

The two-hour tour by the transition year students of Class Éilís from St Aloysius’ College in nearby Carrigtwohill has given them a flavour of how both sides lived, seeing the decadent drawing room with its original floors and paintings, as well as the much humbler quarters once only seen by the servant classes.

While some took pictures on their mobile phones in the entrance hall of the oldest part of the house, originally built as a hunting lodge in 1740, others were just taking it all in.

Claire Kelleher, their guide for the afternoon, explained the history of the house. She pointed to the grills in the floor which were part of the original heating system, once run by a furnace.

“Does it still work?” asked one curious student.

Yes, explained Claire, but now it is oil-run, whereas in the past it would have required a big fire. A natural question from another student was whether this made the house very smoky. She was told it created more dust than smoke.

The house had more than 70 rooms and around the same number of fireplaces.

About 16 staff worked here at any time and all the female staff lived in the quarters to the back of the house. But males, with the exception of the butler who was required to lock the house at night, stayed in outhouses in the courtyard.

In the drawing room, one wide-eyed student inquired about a button in the wall alongside the grand fireplace, which it transpired is a bell to call one of the maids — and yes, the girls discovered, it still works.

The bells themselves hang on walls in the service area to the back of the house, with each servant or maid able to recognise the sound of the bell from each room from where service was being summoned.

Entering the main dining room, Cara O’Brien busily added to the floor plan of the house and explained her rationale. “I’m drawing a map of all the rooms and making a note of what’s in each of them. The idea is to design a Cluedo game around Fota House.”

This creative thinking by herself and some of her classmates is part of the reason they are here, as the visit is more than just about a school tour. It has been carefully planned as part of their business module in transition year, under the tutelage of their business teacher Catherine Begley.

With advance preparation using a web programme designed by the Irish Heritage Trust, they are on a mission to come up with an event at Fota House that can be marketed and promoted to the public to attract more visitors.

Cara’s classmate, Hanna Lane, explained that the Cluedo game would involve riddles directing players to different areas of the house to guide them to the answers in their version of the Whodunnit game.

“It’ll be an interactive game and now that we’ve seen the living quarters and the servants’ area, it could use both sides of the house,” she said.

The recent popularity of TV series Downton Abbey has renewed interest in this dual-strand living that happened in such homes.

The tour ends in the main kitchen where students were challenged to outline some of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the house for future events, part of a ‘SWOT’ analysis they learned about in class before the visit. The number of authentic parts of the house still in place was proffered as a strength, offset by difficulty turning young people’s interest to historic houses.

Students viewed the location as a mixed asset. It is about 16km from Cork city but its accessibility by train on the Cork-Cobh line was given by one girl as a selling point to attract more visitors.

Aside from the Cluedo game, other novel ideas included a suggestion to organise a Haunted House event for Halloween.

While it is mostly a school exercise, their event ideas will be developed and presented to the trust before Christmas and could even become a reality if they make the right impression.