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Bohemian & Libertine · Newtownards, County Down

Mount Stewart (Lady Londonderry & 'The Ark')

Edith, Marchioness of Londonderry, glamorous political hostess, presided as the sorceress 'Circe' over her flirtatious 'Ark' society of bird- and beast-named grandees; she poured that world into Mount Stewart's fantastical gardens, whose carved Dodo Terrace creatures immortalise her glittering salon.

StatusDocumented history
Date'Ark' club from 1915; gardens 1920s
The peopleEdith, Marchioness of Londonderry ('Circe'), Charles, 7th Marquess, Winston Churchill (club member)
The siteMount Stewart, near Greyabbey/Newtownards (National Trust)
Coordinates54.55500, -5.60800 (confidence 5/5)

The story

The concrete menagerie on Mount Stewart's Dodo Terrace is a guest list in disguise. Each creature, moulded by local craftsman Thomas Beattie in the 1920s, stands for a member of the Ark — the private club that Edith, Marchioness of Londonderry, founded in 1915, whose members took punning animal nicknames. Churchill was Winston the Warlock; Edith's husband Charles, Charley the Cheetah; and Edith herself was Circe the Sorceress. Her most talked-about friendship was with Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister ("Hamish the Hart") — an intense, correspondence-filled intimacy that the record shows was emotionally deep and politically potent, while the sexual question stays unresolved and is generally held platonic. Edith also kept a serpent tattoo coiling up her left leg, hidden until rising 1938 hemlines revealed it; it reflected an Edwardian aristocratic fashion, not a family custom. She created the gardens from 1921 and gave them to the National Trust in 1957.

More stories at this spot

A boiler-suited marchioness

Edith Londonderry directed the making of her own gardens in a boiler suit, setting demobilised ex-servicemen to work after 1919 and driving the project herself. Guests who signed the Mount Stewart visitors' book were liable to be handed a wheelbarrow. The hostess who charmed prime ministers also chopped her own wood.

Sources

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