![]() ![]() I’ve broken nearly every bone in my body in sport,” he says. Just before the photographs for this article were taken, Dermot broke a rib when part of a wall collapsed on him as he was strimming hedges. He’s always been a keen sportsman and played club rugby until he was 40 and is big into water sports and fast cars, so getting involved in the physical aspects of running the 200-acre estate is nothing to him. “His family used to have five gardeners, now he’s a gardener himself,” Emily says, referring to Dermot’s love for the garden, where he grows all the flowers for the weddings and other events held at Loughcrew.Īfter boarding at St Columba’s, Dermot left Ireland and travelled the world before coming home and starting his own fish wholesale business, which he’s no longer involved in. He grew up in a grand period home on 1,000 acres in Carlow but, between death duties and the Land Commission, it’s no longer in the family. And there are two petrolheads in the family one is called JJ and one is called Dermot.”įortunately - given there’s so much to do on the estate - Dermot seems to have as much appetite and energy for hard work as Emily. They get on very well with him, Eddie and he both love inventing things for the light show and never stop talking together about it. “I think they think I need grounding and that he might calm me down. I think my sons are relieved,” she says with a laugh. He said, ‘Sort yourself out’ so I did and then I came back to Loughcrew. ![]() “I wasn’t coming back but he captivated me. She does now have an estate manager and a staff of 21, but she attributes a lot of her continuing success to her romantic partner Dermot Fenton, who divides his time between Loughcrew and Narrow Water Castle, near Warrenpoint, Co Down, which is owned by a friend of his, Marcus Hall.Įmily also owns a castle in south-west Wales - Manorbier - and was spending a lot of time there before she met Dermot. Loughcrew is a popular venue for hen parties as well and a growing number of meditation and yoga retreats are held here. Of course the light show, while it will be a showstopper, is only a tiny part of Emily’s enterprise. “Four medics in the family? What does that say about me?” she asks with a laugh. The partners of all three of her sons are in the medical profession. His wife is based in Canada and they haven’t seen each other since the beginning of Covid. Nico is a human rights lawyer in London while JJ is a doctor here in Ireland. Students from NCAD and the Lir Academy will also be involved, while Eddie is also organising the music.Īs well as Eddie, Emily has two other sons - all three have successful careers. ![]() Emily herself will make many of the figures. The show is being designed by top lighting designer Euan Winton and Emily’s son Eddie, a lighting designer with his own lighting design company, Solace, in Scotland. Her big project this year is the light show. Over the years, her enterprises have included a gilding school, which she ran for 20 years until 2009, an opera festival, which ran from 1999 to 2013, and then more recently an adventure centre, which closed some years ago because of the high costs of insurance. Emily feels duty bound to ensure its continuance. There are neolithic cairns on the land, a medieval motte and the remains of a church built by the family of St Oliver Plunkett, a Catholic martyr who died 400 years ago but was only canonised in 1975. Loughcrew is of historical and cultural significance. You name it, we give it another life.”Įver since the resourceful aristocrat - Emily came from a stately home in Buckinghamshire, south-east England - married her late husband Charlie Naper back in the early 1980s and became chatelaine of his family home Loughcrew, which dates from the ninth century, she has been running different enterprises, first to make money to restore Loughcrew, which had been burned down in 1976, and then to keep it going. We use everything we can lay our hands on - hubcaps, old, cracked teacups, plastic curtains, anything. We used water bottles to make chandeliers. We used gas cylinders to make giant figures. It was lockdown yet 7,500 people came to see it. “We had our first, last winter, based on The Nutcracker. “We’re lighting up the gardens, it’s the only light show in the country apart from the Zoo, and we’re making everything ourselves,” she says, adding that this is the second year of the light show. ![]()
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