Qualla: Lissan House

Lissan House: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kenneth Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. There is a clock at the west end of Lissan House that has been keeping time, more or less, since 1820. Joshua Adams made it for the Market House in Magherafelt; Sir Nathaniel Staples bought the whole tower in the 1880s and grafted it onto his crumbling mansion at the foot of the Sperrin Mountains. The bell can still be heard in Churchtown, four miles away. It is mentioned in the old song "Slieve Gallion's Braes." That clock - inherited, repurposed, defiantly still ticking - is the perfect symbol for the house beneath it. The Staples family lived at Lissan from about 1620 until April 2006: the longest continuous occupation of a single house by a single family in Irish history.

Read more: Lissan House on Qualla

Image: Kenneth Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lissan House: Out of Yate Court

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kenneth Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Thomas Staples came over from Yate Court near Bristol in about 1610, one of the smaller players in the great wave of English settlement called the Plantation of Ulster. He settled first in Moneymore - a town the Worshipful Company of Drapers was then building from scratch - befor...

Read more: Lissan House on Qualla

Image: Kenneth Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lissan House: The House That Robert Built

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stuart Yeates from Oxford, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. The present house owes itself to Sir Robert Staples, the fourth Baronet, who married another heiress (Mary Vessey) and built the mansion around 1690, incorporating the older dwelling. Thomas Ashe, surveying for the Archbishop of Armagh in 1703, wrote that "Robert Staples has buil...

Read more: Lissan House on Qualla

Image: Stuart Yeates from Oxford, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lissan House: The Barefoot Baronet

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit QuartierLatin1968, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the early twentieth century, the estate was bleeding money. Sir Robert Ponsonby Staples, twelfth Baronet, was a sufficiently accomplished portrait painter to have founded the Grosvenor Gallery with Sir Coutts Lindsay - the gallery that launched the careers of Whistler and Burn...

Read more: Lissan House on Qualla

Image: QuartierLatin1968 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lissan House: Hazel and the Cunard Years

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alun Salt, CC BY-SA 2.0. By 1943, Lissan was bankrupt. The thirteenth Baronet, Sir Robert George Alexander Staples, divided the house into apartments and moved to England to find work, leaving his cousin Harry Radclyffe-Dolling to manage it. For roughly twenty-five years more than a hundred people lived ...

Read more: Lissan House on Qualla

Image: Alun Salt | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lissan House: Restoration

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kenneth Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 2003, BBC television featured Lissan on its Restoration series, which promised a prize of more than a million pounds for the most popular crumbling building in Britain. Hazel, in her seventies, became the face of the campaign. Lissan made the grand final and lost to the Victor...

Read more: Lissan House on Qualla

Image: Kenneth Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lissan House: What the House Still Holds

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Castlehamilton, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sir Richard Molesworth Ponsonby Staples, the seventeenth and last Baronet, died on 8 November 2013, and the title was declared dormant. Debrett's spent more than a decade searching the genealogies of Nova Scotia and Massachusetts for a male-line heir; three candidates were identi...

Read more: Lissan House on Qualla

Image: Castlehamilton | CC BY-SA 3.0