THE HORSE RIDER’S JOURNAL THE HORSE RIDER’S JOURNAL
| 65 | JOURNAL JOURNAL
When going through the gates, it’s always like entering another
world,” says Samantha Leslie – Sammy, to her friends – of Castle
Leslie. “The estate exists in its own little bubble. It’s so
pretty. Every day it changes with the seasons: in winter it’s
frosty and the trees are wonderfully sculptural, and in summer it’s
lush with flowers all over the place.”
One of the last great working Irish estates with a living
village, still in the hands of its founding family, Castle Leslie
is located in Monaghan County, just a couple of kilometres south of
the border with Northern Ireland. The castle itself is a true
refuge from the modern world, with no televisions, phones or radios
– just plenty of opportunity to take in the beautiful views of
Glaslough Lake and the historic buildings that sit on more than 400
hectares of rolling parkland covered with ancient trees.
The Leslie family can trace its ancestry back to Attila the Hun.
The first Leslie came from Scotland and was a Hungarian nobleman
called Bart-holomew Leslie. The Leslies came to Ireland in 1665 and
have lived here on the estate ever since. Desmond Leslie, Sammy’s
father, took over in 1964 and subsequently passed it on to Sammy,
the fifth of his six children. The size and cost of the estate’s
upkeep as well as the Northern Ireland conflict made it a delicate
matter within the family. But for Sammy, taking the reins of the
estate was never simply a matter of bowing to obligation. “You
can’t make your children take on something like this. No, it’s what
I absolutely wanted to do. In fact, part of my problem is I enjoy
it far, far too much. There are so many projects and I get such a
kick out of it. Each time I complete the restoration of a building
it’s a small success. Don’t laugh, but my car park makes me very
happy! You know you’ve done something right when it just fits right
in seamlessly.”
With Sammy in charge, the estate has undergone an extensive
restoration over the past decade. The idea of transforming the
castle into a hotel and equestrian playground was never far from
her thoughts. “To me it’s a totally natural progression. Since I
was a kid I’ve been working on the farm with the horses, and I
always wanted to put the place back to together. We’re in the
northern part of the country and things here were extremely
difficult in the Seventies and Eighties, with buildings falling
into disrepair. I always said I was going to bring the place back
to life, and I wanted to do it using two things: horses and
hospitality.”
Sammy has managed to revive the estate while remaining sensitive
to the style in which it was built, via tourism and by working
symbiotically with the local village community. It has been a
grand-scale project, executed slowly, the first step being to
establish tea rooms in the old conservatory to generate enough
income to restore the roof. “There’s only a handful of big estates
like this left in Ireland, complete working estates with an estate
village still working closely together. It’s extremely rare.”
Sammy left school when she was only 15. “That was down to a
mixture of the fact that I was very dyslexic, which was never
picked up on, and that I wanted to ride horses. To train as an
instructor I went to England at 18 to gain my British Horse Society
II Trainer qualifications. I also worked with horses in Australia
and New Zealand. I always knew I was going to set up here, but I
realised that if I didn’t travel then I would never get the chance.
I had an amazing time. Later I went to Switzerland to study hotel
manage-ment at Les Roches.”
While teaching riding on the side, Sammy condensed the demanding
three-year course down to 18 months to accommodate the fact that
her father was moving to the South of France for health reasons. So
at 24 she
came back home to take over Castle Leslie. “But I loved
teaching, and still do,” she says, with one of her sunny and
frequent smiles.
Returning home, Sammy found that the Leslies’ equestrian centre,
located at the gates of the estate, had been sold off during a time
of hardship. The grounds were in disrepair, and money was so tight
that she sold her father’s car – without his knowledge – to set up
The Victorian Tea Rooms, determined to do whatever job needed
doing, restoring the ailing property when she could. “I quickly
realised I would never earn enough out of horses to do what I
really wanted, so I went into business.”
In 2004, after 20 years in external ownership, Sammy was able to
realise her dream of buying back the estate’s equestrian centre and
hunting lodge. In the years that followed, the Lodge, as it’s
known, with its 35 bedrooms, was restored, along with a new
state-of-the-art Castle Leslie Equestrian Centre. At its reopening
in May 2007 the equestrian centre boasted 56 new stables, tack and
lecture rooms and an indoor and outdoor arena – not to mention sand
gallops, 40 kilometres of bridle path and more than 200
cross-country fences across the parklands. “I was finally able to
build my fantasy dream yard for people to come on riding holidays.
I wanted it to be relaxed, fun, easygoing and welcoming. At the
same time it had to be beautifully done – from the quality of the
yard to the arenas’ surfaces, the cross-country and the wonderful
experience of toasting your horse from the hot tub, or having a
massage, a pint of Guinness or a seriously good gin.”
In June 2002, all eyes were on the estate when it was the venue
for the wedding of Paul McCartney and Heather Mills. The couple was
far from the first or last A-listers to stay at the castle, but
Sammy’s not one for naming names. As she puts it: “Everybody has a
right to slip in and out unnoticed, to switch off and experience
life as it should be.”
For hundreds of years, horses have played an important role in
the family’s history, and the Leslies built no less than three
stable yards on the estate. “My family have all ridden. My-great
grandfather won the military cup in the 1930, an early version of
Badminton Horse Trials. My aunt Anita married Paul Rodzianko, an
incredible horseman and Russian cavalry officer for Tsar Nicholas
II. He trained with Caprilli and brought the forward seat to
Russia. He ended up training the Irish equestrian team and wrote a
book called Modern Horsemanship. You can see his photos dotted
around the Lodge.”
Recent generations of the Leslie family also include war heroes,
artists, politicians and writers. Sammy’s father was an RAF
Spitfire pilot and eccentric aristocrat, whose book The Flying
Saucers Have Landed underpinned the New Age movement, and his
personal life was equally unconventional. Built in the heyday of
the Victorian era’s taste for excess by her great-great
grandfather, the estate has always been Sammy’s home. When she was
eight, her parents set up an equestrian holiday venture in 1974 in
the then-empty Lodge, drawing guests from Europe and the USA for
riding holidays. “There were always people coming to ride here,
either friends or what we called PGs – paying guests. Everyone was
riding.”
Sammy grew up in the Sixties and Seventies in the beautiful but
crumbling castle, with freezing winters and buckets everywhere to
catch leaks when it rained. It was a childhood destined to be
unusual, and her personal connection with horses grew strong from
an early age. “As children we had endless numbers of ponies, and we
were so naughty, bringing them into the house to ride back and
forth through the gallery. Once I brought my pony Flash into the
kitchen and offered him a drink. When he heard the running water,
he peed all over the kitchen floor. I don’t think I’ll ever forget
that day!” The memory still
THE HORSE RIDER’S JOURNAL THE HORSE RIDER’S JOURNAL
| 1615 | JOURNAL JOURNAL
makes her laugh. “We certainly never had expensive ponies – we
had rescue ponies or scruffy little things from the mountains, but
they were absolutely brilliant. It was a very free childhood. We
woke up, packed our lunch and got on our ponies. We were the last
generation to have that freedom, I think. We could disappear, just
go off, ride as far as we liked, have picnics and go swimming with
the ponies. Although maybe we didn’t wear helmets as often as we
should have.”
“With a house this size,” she continues, “there were always lots
of people on the estate, with guests coming and going, so it hasn’t
changed that much. These houses were built on a big scale to
entertain and be full of life. If it was empty and moulding away,
that would be sad.”
Sammy has added six further guest rooms in the castle, bringing
the total up to 20. Between 1995 and 1997, the existing 14 bedrooms
were refurbished, each in its own unique style. “I love that side
of it. I love design and working with the builders all the way
through. I find inspira-tion everywhere and anywhere, from
different textures and colours. I have these ideas boxes where I
chuck inspirations until I need them.”
After years of very hands-on work, Sammy’s role now is more
strate-gic.
“I started working in the stable, then set up the tea room, then
the restaurant, working in the kitchen. I started taking guests and
bought the equestrian centre back and rebuilt that. I have been at
it for 25 years, growing it bit by bit. Now I’m working on our
hundred-year plan, which certainly involves horses as well as
storytelling, bringing in more restoration projects and figuring
out what else we can do with the old skills we’ve got here.”
Today Sammy lives in a separate wing of the castle not
easily
discovered. “A secret door in the castle leads to my kitchen
cupboard door, which says ‘Welcome to Narnia’,” she laughs. ‘Uncle
Jack’ or Sir John Norman Ide Leslie, a relative of former British
prime minister Winston Churchill and now in his nineties, still
lives in the castle too. “Jack is amazing. No one else lives here
fulltime – the rest of the family comes and goes, because they have
separate lives and careers. At Christmas we take the whole house
for an annual drinks party, and have a big family Christmas. It’s
lots of fun.”
When asked about her favourite spot on the estate, Sammy
hesitates with a rare pause. “Anywhere and everywhere! There are so
many places. Swimming in the lake with my ponies as a child would
have been my favourite place then, but now I think it’s a bit too
wet. My favourite place could still be on the back of a horse. I
took a couple of years off after overcoming breast cancer and I
don’t ride enough at the moment. But that will change now that the
business is settling in. I really want to get back in the
saddle.”
For more information, go to www.inthesaddle.com
