The Hell Fire Club, I remember first hearing of
this hellish but curiously alluring building as a small child lost
in the mountains of Wicklow on a gloomy, foggy and bitterly cold
night. May I hasten to add that I was safely tucked away in the
back of a warm car with my sleeping siblings whilst my father
regaled my mother of the hell-raising escapades of the Club's
colourful members.
Years later I happened across it quite
unexpectedly, in fact I didn't know what it was until I stopped in
a local tavern for a wee dram of whiskey to warm the cockles. It
is now little more than a ruin which sits on the summit of
Montpelier, a hill in the Dublin mountains. It was built in the
1720s by William Connolly, the speaker of the Irish House of
Commons, as a hunting lodge.
Originally called Mount Pelier, it consisted
of two large rooms and a hall on the upper floor and kitchen and
servant's hall on the ground floor. The original Hell Fire Club
was established at West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire in 1741 by Sir
Francis Dashwood. It soon became infamous with rumour of pagan
rituals, sexual orgies and devil worship.
Taking Dashwood's model as inspiration,
Richard Parsons, the First Earl of Rosse established a Hell Fire
Club in Ireland. The Club was an exclusive retreat for wealthy
rakes who got up to high jinks, allegedly drinking heavily,
engaging in madcap sex orgies and dabbling in the occult. Rumours
spread throughout Dublin City that the devil had appeared amongst
the fine gentleman disguised as a weary traveller seeking food and
lodging.
The fine gentlemen taking him for chump,
dragged him into a game of cards to take whatever the poor old sod
had left. Whilst the game was in full flow, a hand of cards was
dropped on the floor, reaching down to scoop them up one of the
rakes saw that the stranger was not sporting shoes, no, rather
there was a hideous pair of cloven hooves, the devil rather
bizarrely appeared windy, disappearing in a plume of smoke,
leaving behind the mark of his goat-like hooves, which can be seen
within the walls of the lodge to this day.
