A legacy of tradition and adaptation
With its origins traced to a home that became known as Hollywood House, the building that today is the Mount Falcon hotel has stood for nearly 150-years. Originally conceived of to win a hand in marriage for a gentleman suitor, the house at Mount Falcon and the immediate surrounds have been home to two young families, a site of administration and employment for the surrounding area, a guesthouse known for its access to nature and outdoor pursuits, and most recently as our home as the Mount Falcon hotel.
The larger demesne has been sought after for its natural beauty and access to the River Moy for at least the past 400 years. Long before that in the deep past the earliest known inhabitants of the area found meaning and purpose to these same vistas and flood plains possibly as far back as 5,000 years ago. For these reasons and others those of us who live and work at Mount Falcon, and those who visit the 100-acre wooded estate, know this place to be a unique and special location in an already captivating and haunting part of the West of Ireland.
What we know as the Mount Falcon demesne today took root in the 1820s after Major John Knox purchased over 2,000 acres from a soldier, Capt. Edward Watts, who was granted the land after serving under Cromwell in the mid-17th c. It was then Major Knox’s eldest son, John Frederic Knox, who after marrying Anna Maria Knox-Gore, daughter of the Knox-Gores of Belleek Manor just a few miles up the road in Ballina, that the first and still standing dwelling was constructed on the property. What later became known as Hollywood House, a name that foreshadowed an impossibly imagined future 200-years later, still stands, though broken windowpanes and crumbling features define it’s façade today.
While a shadow of its former self, the presence of Hollywood House along the River Moy signalled the beginning of a long legacy and love affair with the Mount Falcon demesne. Since its completion in 1826 Hollywood House served as the de facto seat of the Knox family, and it was from here that the works of transforming the adjacent landscape across the Foxford Road into a domesticated estate began. By the late 1830s Mount Falcon was known to be a handsome estate and had a horse track popular among the locals.
Though it is possible there were always plans to build a larger structure in the present location of the Mount Falcon manor house, circumstance played a role in the timing of its coming. One such impedance which wrenched at the hearts and minds of everyone in Ireland was the Great Irish Famine, also known as the Great Hunger, the Irish Potato Famine, or even the Great Starvation. Agricultural, environmental, economic and certainly political events all transpired to create devastating effects to the Irish population. The West of Ireland and County Mayo are known to be among the hardest hit.
The existence today of any remnants of Hollywood House, or indeed the later Mount Falcon manor house itself, is a testament to how the Knoxes dealt with the upheaval and turmoil of the hunger and exodus of the mid-1800s. Generally accepted to be a “benevolent and indulgent landlord”, John Knox built a soup kitchen at the back of Hollywood House to feed his starving tenants. The soup kitchen likely endeared Knox to his tenants and locals and could have been a consideration in later years during the War of Independence and the Civil War in the early 1920s when as many as 300 big houses across Ireland were destroyed by fire as political and socio-economic statements.
Upon the elder Knox’s passing in 1871 the estate, all 2,000 acres, Hollywood House and a sum of £3,000 was passed to Utred Augustus Knox. Of John and Anna Maria’s eight sons and one daughter, it was Utred, the second born son, who eventually inherited the estate after the untimely passing of his older brother, Frederic Edgar Knox, four years earlier. It was Frederic, not the brothers’ father John, who was first interred in the family burial plot which still exists at the back of the estate overlooking the symmetrical Nephin Mountain on the western horizon.
The circular enclosure where several members of the Knox family are buried resembles an ancient earthen and stone rath or fort. There are practical as well as symbolic uses for the construction of the earthen circle, including keeping livestock out of the family burial plot with the aid of the poisonous berries from the two Yew trees planted within. The symbolism extends to the placement of the rath just a few yards from a documented ancient wedge tomb known colloquially as ‘Darby’s Bed’. This ancient stone burial structure can still be seen today after a short walk on the woodland trails. Ask the front desk for a property map to help you find its location.
The £3,000 Utred inherited from his father were for the express purpose of building what John put in his will as “a mansion house at Mt. Falcon.” It must not have been a well-kept secret that the Knoxes, either father or son, intended to build at Mount Falcon as the first correspondence between the eventual architect of Mount Falcon and it’s soon to be landlord and tenant Utred, was dated a full five months before the senior Knox’s passing. It was renowned architect James Franklin Fuller who pressed the issue writing to Utred in May of 1871 attaching references and saying, “In dealing with me you may be confident that you will not run into expenses for ‘extras’ over and above the money which you may be inclined to spend.” Anyone who has ever built something, no less a stately manor hose in the country, knows that one’s intended budget is rarely the final cost of a project. In Utred’s case it was no different. He eventually spent more than triple his initial outlay to finish Mount Falcon.
Knox and Fuller exchanged correspondence throughout the process, Utred with specifications and requirements for the project, and Fuller with suggestions and recommendations both for ways to save on cost and for ways to ensure the final product met expectations. One could forgive Fuller if he had been perturbed by Knox who had hoped his ideas could be turned into mortar and stone for a sum of £2,000. Fuller replied matter-of-factly, “Impossible, it takes that sum to build a very poor house nowadays. Not one such as you want.”
Fuller, through some coaxing, managed to convince Knox of a sum closer to £4,000 being reasonable enough to deliver the project on time and as conceived. The eventual contracted builder from Dublin, Henry Sharpe, quoted £5,800 to complete the build. Knox came back to Fuller and said he could not exceed £6,000. In October of 1872 Knox and Sharpe agreed on a sum of £6,650, the signed contract of which can be seen hanging in the Boathole Bar just inside the door – ask the bartender to point it out.
Despite Utred’s ultimate acquiescence, and in some cases insistence, on cost overruns, or perhaps even because of them, what we are left with is a building and grounds which have stood the test of time. Knox’s future mother-in-law may be partly to blame, and indeed can claim no small measure of credit, for this outcome. The Lady Sarah Knox-Gore, mother of Utred’s first cousin Agnes Frances Nina Knox-Gore, was not impressed by the relatively modest Hollywood House the Knoxes called home in the few decades leading up to Mount Falcon’s construction. Lady Sarah insisted that if Utred wanted to marry her daughter he would need to build something more suitable to Agnes’s status. Conveniently Utred was aided in his endeavour by a handsome loan from Lady Sarah of €5,450. Between Utred’s inheritance and the Lady Sarah’s contribution Utred was nearly able to pay for the entire project. By the time the home was finished and furnished in 1876 Knox had leveraged himself to the tune of £10,000, or nearly €2,000,000 in today’s Euros. Perhaps Utred could take solace in the fact that were he alive today he would be hard pressed to accomplish the same feat for less than an order of magnitude more than he originally paid.
With the marriage of Utred and Agnes in the summer of 1875 and the completion of the new manor house at Mount Falcon the following year another generation of Knoxes began their tenure on the demesne. The newlyweds had six daughters and one son at Mount Falcon and oversaw the estate which employed several staff. Much of the recreation we enjoy today on the property is the same as it was in Utred and Anges’s day. The same wooded paths and fishing beats family and friends used nearly 150-years ago are well trod today by guests of the hotel.
Sadly, Agnes died at only 57 in the Spring of 1906, but Utred lived on to the ripe age of 88 passing away in May of 1913. The estate then changed hands to the Knox’s only male heir, Captain Utred Arthur Frederic Knox, who upon returning from fighting in the Great War with the Royal Irish Rifles, 4th Battalion, in France set about the process of downsizing his holdings in December of 1916. In a tale not unlike ones popularised in such television shows as Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey, Captain Knox at the age of 33 had within three months sold his inherited land in Co. Sligo along with all but 320 acres of the Mount Falcon demesne in order to keep what holdings he could. Though the exact reasons for Capt. Knox’s divestment are not known the years after the First World War saw many wealthy landowners across the British Isles, including in Ireland which was still under the Crown, no longer being able to afford to keep such grand and expansive estates intact, not to mention the changing social pallet regarding such arrangements.
Perhaps due in part to those changing social norms, or perhaps just as a measure of good will and keeping with the family’s close ties to the estate and community, Capt. Knox had never collected rent from the staff living on the estate. In fact, Capt. Knox let his tenants have the land they lived on for free and promised to maintain them at his expense. A newspaper article from the time mentioned that “he was only following in the footsteps of his father.”
The 1920s ushered in a new era for Mount Falcon and indeed all of Ireland. In a time of revolution and upheaval during the War of Independence Capt. Knox sought a way to keep Mount Falcon financially secure while simultaneously providing some employment for his tenants. In December of 1921 Knox opened a sawmill on the estate to generate much needed income. In what must have felt like a terrible blow to him personally and to the financial health of the estate only two months later the sawmill was burnt to the ground allegedly by an angry ex-employee who also threatened to light the manor house ablaze. The mill was never reopened.
Capt. Knox lived on alone at Mount Falcon for another 11-years before finally getting married and moving to Cornwall, England where he eventually died in 1935 at the age of 49 with no children. Before Knox left for England he found a buyer for his family estate in Major Robert Beauclerk Aldridge who purchased the remaining acreage and home for £7,000, less than Utred A. Knox spent to build and furnish the home 56-years prior.
When Maj. Aldridge purchased Mount Falcon he did not take Hollywood House and its surrounding land. Instead, Hollywood House was purchased by the former land agent of the estate, Joseph McLean. In a strange case of history repeating itself an employee of the residence, a 70-year-old woman, was charged and convicted of lighting Hollywood House and an outbuilding on fire. The outbuilding, an office built by one of the Knox family, was destroyed while Hollywood House itself managed to only sustain smoke damage.
The new owners of Mount Falcon were no strangers to Co. Mayo. The Major and his wife Constance, had been living at Glenmore House in Moygownagh a few minutes from the shores of Lough Conn in Crossmolina. The former Aldridge home, built in the late 18th c. still stands today as a renovated private residence and estate a short 25 minute drive from Mount Falcon. Just as previous generations of Knoxes had been drawn to Mount Falcon for its proximity to the River Moy and access to outdoor pursuits, so too were Maj. Aldridge and Constance, or ‘Connie’ as she was known. The Major was chairman of the Board of the Moy Fishery Conservators, wrote articles on local archaeology, and was known to bring his guests on excursions to local medieval ruins.
It was Connie, however, who is still remembered today as the matriarch of post-WWII Mount Falcon. She and her husband turned Mount Falcon into a guesthouse after the war and hosted visitors until 2000 when at the age of 91 she sold the estate. Though the Major died in the Autumn of 1976 he and Connie played host to celebrities and dignitaries throughout their run as Mount Falcon’s first hoteliers. Among those who were able to enjoy Connie’s renowned hospitality were Vivien Leigh of Gone with the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire, Inspector Jaques Clouseau himself of the Pink Panther, Peter Sellers, former Irish president Dr. Patrick Hillary and former Taoiseach Jack Lynch.
Connie, it seems, was something of a visionary being one of the 11 founding members of the Ireland's Blue Book Association in 1974. The publication was created to help market the bed and breakfast accommodation available across Ireland and promote the country’s historic properties. Connie and her husband’s work laid the foundation for what Mount Falcon was to become. Though Connie died in 2003 her legacy lives on in today’s Mount Falcon hotel.
The estate house was briefly owned and partially refurbished before Alan Maloney and his brothers, Barry and Michael purchased the property in 2002 and undertook a massive renovation and construction project to create what we know today as the Mount Falcon hotel. The Maloneys were inspired by Connie’s work and reputation and the heritage that she, her husband and successive generations of the Knox family worked tirelessly to preserve. Today Mount Falcon has 100-acres of wooded and manicured estate land, walking trails, a Falconry, clay pigeon shooting range, luxurious spa and leisure centre, a fishing lake, and 2-miles of fishery on the River Moy which is still known as one of Europe’s, if not the world’s, best salmon fisheries.
The features of Fuller’s designs which made his works recognisable and sought after in his time have been maintained and can still be seen in the hotel. Fuller’s dramatic central staircase and foyer entrance continue to thrill visitors to the property. Conversions were made to update the home to suit its role as a hotel, including turning the original kitchen into a dining room and making one of the front sitting rooms a bar with a snug and a view of the Ox Mountains. Even with these changes, the charm, character, and provenance of Fuller’s design remains intact as a testament to his greater body of work. In due course, Fuller cemented his place in history through several architectural works, including Kylemore Abbey in Connemara which was built before Mount Falcon, and afterward Ashford Castle in Cong and Farmleigh House in Dublin, the latter of which was built for the Guiness family in Phoenix Park as a summer getaway from the city.
To arrive at Mount Falcon today is to participate in a legacy stretching back over a century and a half of community and hospitality. The land, as ever, is the centre piece of an estate that in contemporary terms represents a lineage of devoted owners and caretakers whose love of the outdoors is the very reason they poured so much of themselves and their fortunes into building and keeping this home. A warm hearth, a good meal, and an excellent host remain trademarks of the Mount Falcon offering. As the founding partner of the hotel, Alan Maloney continues the tradition of welcoming guests from around the world and down the road to his home. Just as Connie did for decades, Alan plays host to locals celebrating birthdays and christenings alongside todays Hollywood royalty, sporting legends, political figures, and even U.S. President Joe Biden prior to his presidency. Biden claims Ballina as one of his ancestral homes.
Since 1876 the manor house at Mount Falcon has been a constant on the landscape. Standing in front of the original Scottish Baronial façade one can without much effort imagine the home as it was a century ago with family and staff mulling about inside busy with the chores and concerns of everyday life in turn-of-the-century rural Ireland. For today’s staff of the hotel, it is one of their goals to help first time visitors and returning guests alike feel when they walk through the large wooden front door and see the fireplace burning that they are coming home to a welcoming experience just as past guests have.
Note - This brief essay is based on the work of Martin J. Leonard who was commissioned by the Maloney family to produce a history of Mount Falcon titled The Knox Family of Mount Falcon and Hollywood. Where quoted, excerpts were used from Leonard’s original work. The full piece contains further detail on the families that called Hollywood House and Mount Falcon home and interesting anecdotes and communications between Utred and Fuller regarding the construction of Mount Falcon itself.
