The great escape: Time travel at Ard na Sidhe Country House 

Aptly enough, considering the month that’s in it.

Bowen’s autumnal story of Anglo-Irish gentry appeared on shelves in 1929, 16 years after Ard na Sidhe’s first resident curled up with a book on one of this Arts and Crafts manor’s window seats, overlooking Caragh Lake.

Both The Last September and Rebecca (published in August 1938) portray a society where guests unpacked their bags for an indefinite period of time.

Ard na Sidhe is just such a home, one of our hosts, Debbie, tells us as we step over its threshold. “When these houses were built, people would come to visit and might not leave until weeks or months later,” she says.

Others to have stuck around for quite a while are two ghosts we’re told roam the grounds (back again to the vibe of du Maurier’s bestseller) and, possibly, the landowners’ otherworldly predecessors.

Because Ard na Sidhe is Irish for Hill of the Fairies.

The name refers to the tree-covered knoll close to the manor house which perches on a rock-covered slope that looks west across Caragh Lake, in the foothills of Ireland’s highest mountain range, the McGillicuddy Reeks.

Around a half-hour drive from Killarney and close to Killorglin, it was built by Lady Edith Gordon.

And trust me, it really feels as if Lady Edith still lives here.

Staff talk about her as if they know her — particularly the women. “I always say ‘hello, Lady Gordon’,” when I arrive into the living room every morning,” says one of our hosts, Sandra, pointing to Lady Edith’s portrait, just inside the door.

The picture is carefully positioned so the first owner can survey the garden she planted, over a century ago.

Lady Gordon was a member of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and she was also a Nationalist, which fed into the social improvements she was keen to make locally. It’s for this work, particularly with women and children, that she is remembered in the area, my hosts tell me.

They also recall her feats on the fairways as if Lady Edith last teed off the day of our arrival. In fact, the original chatelaine was instrumental in setting up the nearby Dooks Golf Course.

Edith was born in 1871 in Milltown, Co Kerry, and married English cricketer and cricket historian Charles Seton Montague Home Gordon in 1901.

She started to build Ard na Sidhe Country House on land that had been owned by her relative, Bess Stokes (whose ghost is said to haunt the grounds), in 1913. 

Lady Gordon moved into a small, timber-framed lodge on the site while the house was being constructed, to the design of English architect Richard Percy Morley Horder.

She enlisted a contractor from Killorglin and local workmen, and all the materials were of Irish origin, apart from the Westmorland roof slates.

The long, low and gabled residence has casement windows set in stone mullions.

The Kerry rain’s effect on the warm brown sandstone gives it the appearance of having weathered centuries.

In fact, Lady Edith describes how the Arts and Crafts building “never looked new” in her 1934 autobiography The Winds of Time where she charts each step of her journey to achieving “the house of my dreams”.

This book is now out of print, but I get to take the library’s first edition upstairs with me and its author’s voice is as fresh as if she was right there, kicking back in the chaise longue for a late-night chat, as I sample the room’s four-poster bed (the decadence of it all).

A keen globetrotter and witty writer, she shares the gossip of Kerry, Dublin, London, Lake Garda and beyond of the time.

Read a sentence or two penned by Lady Gordon and you'll get a more vivid idea of the early 20th-century Kerry — and London — social scene than you would from a weighty history book.

She gives a lively account in her autobiography of the Bourn Vincents of Muckross, Killarney, and their stately residence: “Muckross, the equally lovely home for generations of the Herbert family, had been bought at that time by Mr Bourn, a Californian millionaire, for his only daughter, Maud, the wife of Arthur Vincent. 

"Newly married, young and rich, the Vincents entertained royally and gardened imperially...until the gods, jealous as always of successful enterprise in Ireland, dealt ill-fated Muckross a shattering knock-out blow — Maud Vincent dying tragically of pneumonia in New York.

“Her husband, finding it impossible after her death to keep up the place as they had done in the past, offered it, in 1932, to the Nation. The Government accepted the gift without having the slightest idea of what to do with it.

"Someday, perhaps, the youth of Ireland, wandering by the shores of the lake .... will realize the beauty of its marvellous possession. Meanwhile, the house stands silent and deserted.”

Back to Lady Edith's own front door: When a visitor, pointing to the rounded cut-stone arch over the entrance door, commented on seeing “a Romanesque door in an Elizabethan house”, Lady Gordon defended her design, explaining that it was an Irish house and that as there is no traditional domestic architecture in Ireland, her architect sought inspiration in the ruined churches, which she said were the only survival in Kerry of an ancient Gaelic civilization.

Sadly, for the owner, she left Ard na Sidhe in 1935 after the breakdown of her marriage as she could no longer afford to keep the house.

A keen gardener, Lady Edith planted numerous trees and laid out many features in the grounds, most of which have long since disappeared except the rock garden. She also created a garden in Lismore, Co Waterford, where she lived up to her death in 1945.

In the late 1970s, several rare trees and shrubs were supplied by Hilliers, the Hampshire nursery farm.

The estate was purchased by the late Dr Hans Liebherr in 1958 from the owners at the time, the Hobson family, who then emigrated to Africa. After internal renovations, Ard na Sidhe Country House opened as a hotel two years later. In recent years, the Arts and Crafts-style house has been carefully restored by Howley Hayes architects.

The 32 acres of gardens offer direct access to Caragh Lake and guests of the four-star hotel can explore the lake thanks to complimentary use of the hotel’s rowing boat, while fishing is also available, and the 400-acre farm produces beef and lamb for the menus.

The 18 bedrooms are divided between the main and garden house. The ground-floor garden house rooms open onto an outdoor terrace overlooking the gardens where afternoon tea is served, weather permitting.

As an escape, it’s as its name suggests — otherworldly and magical. No TV in our bedroom, giving the best excuse to chill on a chaise with a book or peer out over the terrace (where I fully expect to see Maxim de Winter awaiting his breakfast). 

Spacious ensuite bathrooms from another era invite lengthy soaks and hosts welcome guests as they would a relative — just arrived for a stay of indefinite duration in their country pile.

• Ard na Sidhe Country House, Caragh Lake, Killorglin, Co Kerry, is now a four-star hotel and is part of Killarneyhotels
• See Ardnasidhe