Harristown tour a festival highlight

Hubert Beaumont clearly loves his home with a real passion, writes Brian Byrne. If he didn't, the sheer effort of keeping Harristown House going would surely have long since driven him to sail a canoe into the sunset on the Liffey that flows by it.

"I farm to keep the house," he admitted to an entranced group of local people today, your Editor included, as he showed us through the Georgian small mansion which in one form or another has graced the outskirts of Kilcullen since the latter half of the 18th century.

The tour was part of Brannockstown Summer Festival 2011, and by unanimous conclusion of the larger than expected group it will go down as a festival highlight.

It can't be easy to bring a crowd of strangers through your family home, but Hubert conducted the tour not just with easy grace, but also with a great degree of gentle humour. His recalling of the history of the house, built by the La Touche family and in the ownership of the Beaumonts since 1946, was both engaging and very personal when he spoke of his extended family and some of his own experiences in keeping it going.

We'll do something on the tour in more detail later, but if you haven't gotten to the Brannockstown Summer Festival 2011 yet, do at least visit the Art & Photography Exhibition in the Baptist Hall, in the grounds of the Baptist Church built by the family who first constructed the home which the Beaumonts have since preserved for posterity at no small cost, both financially and to their privacy.

You have already missed the highlight. But Hubert promised it will happen again next year. It isn't too soon to make a forward diary entry.