We created the property boom but we never learn our lessons

Come back and write another chapter, Daphne. That’s what Victoria White kept thinking as she stared in horror at the security fencing which now surrounds the Puxley Mansion outside Castletownbere. She explains why.

I’m a sucker for Gothic ruins and a sucker for the Gothic novels of Daphne du Maurier. I’d visited Dunboy Castle and the nearby Puxley Mansion before years ago and I recognised the ruin from the dust-jacket of my copy of du Maurier’s Hungry Hill, which is loosely based on the history of the Puxley family.

Like most of du Maurier’s best work, Hungry Hill is a vehemently anti-empire. It portrays a family which has stolen the land from the natives and plundered the landscape for copper. Both get their own back. The estate returns to the natives and to nature.