Brookhall Mill - A GNR(I) Micro Layout

[Galteemore]

Not a dry eye in the house. Lovely 

[Gabhal Luimnigh]

Great stuff Patrick, lovely video.

[Rush and Lusk]

Fabulous story board and video production - very well done Patrick.

[Patrick Davey]

A nice new arrival at BHM!

The new UTA-liveried Jinty from Marks Models/Hornby has arrived.  Once the couplings were removed it looks great, obviously not super detailed but certainly a fantastic model at a great price, the UTA livery looks good to me!  Looking forward to running it soon.   Well done Mark!

 

[murphaph]

She looks right at home there Patrick!

[Patrick Davey]

2 minutes ago, murphaph said:

She looks right at home there Patrick!

She does Philip - Mr. Weaver approves! 

[jhb171achill]

Absolutely perfect in this setting!

[Patrick Davey]

Happy Christmas everyone - I had hoped to have something brand new to show off by now but life, work and family very inconveniently got in the way.  Hopefully it's not too far away now though.

In the meantime, here's the Brookhall Mill Christmas video from a few years back.

Thanks for all the great content here, as well as the lively and informative debates and the constant encouragement and inspiration.  And thanks for putting up with my insane stories and cringeworthy puns.  Thanks to admins too for keeping us all in check.

Looking forward to seeing what 2025 brings - personally I will be CHUFFED if a certain thing is announced.......

Hope to see loads of photos tomorrow of all the goodies you all found under your trees!!

 

[Signal Post]

Saw this video pop up on my youtube feed on Christmas Eve, I knew it was going to be good before I even looked at it, it was....superb. The tracks of the bus in the snow just look perfect with the musical accompaniment.

Seasons greeting to yourself Patrick and all on here, hope to see some of you at the various model railway shows throughout 2025.

Edited December 27, 2024 by Signal Post

[Patrick Davey]

Blackstaff Cottage

When Mr. Weaver was approaching retirement in the early 1950s, he began to think about the options for his future, post-Brookhall Mill.  As much as he loved living in the station house at the mill with his two cats Merlin and Peregrine, he knew he could not remain there after his retirement, and in any case he wanted to seek new challenges and explore new horizons.  As was often the case, fortune found its way to Mr. Weaver, and in July 1955 he unexpectedly became the owner of a cottage in Co. Monaghan, which was gifted to him by his late father’s sole surviving sibling, the rather eccentric Auntie Hester.  

Mr. Weaver was originally from Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan, which is where he began his career on the GNR(I) as a boy porter, back in 1905.  The next stopping place beyond Inniskeen, travelling towards Clones, was the small halt at Blackstaff, and from 1930, Auntie Hester was the crossing keeper at the adjacent level crossing, living in the small railway house across the road from the short platform.  Hester had been a lifelong spinster, a passionate feminist, a controversial columnist, a prolific artist, a committed ornithologist, a renowned botanist and a notorious socialite.  She was also an obsessive cat lover, with no fewer than nineteen felines keeping her company at the crossing keeper’s house.  Since the 1930s, she had also been the custodian of the nearby ‘Blackstaff Cottage’, the ancestral home of the Weavers, and it was this property which she gifted to Mr. Weaver in 1955 after she surprised the family by announcing that she was getting married, at the age of 82, to the obscenely wealthy Lord Ignatius Piriton Meen, the 98-year old chairman of the international pharmaceutical company Sneezoff which specialised in the production of anti-allergy medication.

Blackstaff Cottage was located a short walk from the railway halt, and Hester would divide her time between the cottage and the tiny crossing keeper’s house at the halt.  The cottage occupied a scenic location on the banks of the River Shinn, a tributary of the larger River Fane, and the two waterways combined to complement Mr. Weaver’s political leanings, which he had wisely suppressed while he had been at Brookhall.

Hester’s late night get-togethers at Blackstaff Cottage were very popular among the high and mighty of Counties Monaghan and Louth, and were frequented by everyone who was anyone in the locality.  The famous Monaghan wordsmith Patrick Kavanagh was a regular attendee, and on one occasion the Carrickmacross Chronicle published a somewhat risqué tribute from Kavanagh to Hester, and to the quality of the entertainment and cuisine on offer at Blackstaff Cottage:

To get to Hester’s hooleys, the locals they are itchin’

They’ve heard about the tasty treats she serves up in her kitch’n

They walk the lane from Culloville, they cross the hills from Cooley

They bridge the gap from Newry town to get to Hester’s hooleys

Micky-Joe McConnell says he’s feelin’ rather wooley

After drinkin’ to the wee small hours at one of Hester’s hooleys

There came a Sunday warning, from the Reverend Father Dooley

But he went astray that very same night, at one of Hester’s hooleys

Mr. Weaver was horrified at the implications of impropriety in these lines and he eventually forced an apology from Kavanagh and the newspaper.  But Hester was quietly delighted at all the fuss, which only served to enhance her socialite status, and it was thanks to this incident that she first met Lord Meen, when he was an honoured guest at one particularly boisterous gathering at the cottage.  Kavanagh subsequently completed his earlier poetic tribute by adding this appropriate verse:

Then Hester met the young Lord Meen, he said he loved her truly

Cupid was a guest that night, at Hester Weaver’s hooley 

Needless to say, Kavanagh received an invitation to the wedding, but Mr. Weaver wasn’t too happy about this and he refused to acknowledge the prominent poet’s presence.

The marriage of Miss Hester Flora Weaver to Lord Ignatius Piriton Meen was, unsurprisingly, the biggest social event ever held in County Monaghan.  Hester insisted that the wedding ceremony be held in the magnificent setting of St. Macartan’s Cathedral in Monaghan town, and that there would be a strong botanical theme.  Very extravagant floral displays were created and the 25 bridesmaids (with a combined age of 1,875) proudly carried bouquets made from the most expensive and exclusive lilies, roses and daffodils.  And it was, of course, highly appropriate that the chief celebrant was the Bishop of Ferns.  Lord Meen decided to make one of his customary generous community gestures on the occasion of this, his 17th marriage, and after consultation with a local Monaghan pharmacy, a wedding invitation was extended to everyone in the locality who had suffered from a debilitating allergy in recent years.  The presence of so much floral material heightened the emotion of the occasion, and by the time the ceremony was over, there was hardly a dry eye in the cathedral.

The reception was held at Castle Leslie in Glaslough, and all those attending were brought to Glaslough by a special GNR train - Lord Meen was also a former director of the GNR(I).  Lord Meen appointed his own wedding co-ordinator for the day, she was the meticulously-efficient CEO of Sneezoff, Anna Phil Actic.

Mr. Weaver had been a regular visitor to Blackstaff Cottage for many years, travelling by train of course from Brookhall to Lisburn, where he changed to a main line train to bring him to Dundalk, from where he took an Irish North train for the leisurely jaunt over to Blackstaff Halt.  Auntie Hester would usually be waiting for him on the platform, ready to berate him for not being a more frequent visitor.  She was the only person who could make the usually stern-faced Mr. Weaver recoil in fear.

Mr. Weaver was of course very grateful to Auntie Hester for gifting the cottage to him, because it answered the question of where he was going to go when he retired, but he was also quietly amused by her marriage to the anti-allergy medication millionaire Lord Meen, because it handed the wordplay-loving Mr. Weaver the golden opportunity of henceforth referring to Hester as “Auntie Hester Meen”.

Sometime after Auntie Hester had departed for her new life of opulence and leisure, Mr. Weaver was delighted to discover a photo of her from her time as the crossing keeper at Blackstaff Halt, and he maintained that it was none other than one E. de Valera himself looking out of the carriage window beside the photographer, no doubt making his way to Blackstaff Cottage for one of Auntie Hester’s legendary evening soirees:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/54253226569/in/photolist-2k5Mnxq-2qEaY76-2mz5zGU/

(Apologies - the photo will only be viewable by IRRS members.)

Obviously this is just a totally crackpot story, framing the fact that I have built a freelance cottage in 4mm - it was intended to be an exercise in obsessive interior detail, so keep a look out for a workbench post with more details!

****

This is the site of the actual Blackstaff Halt, in a selection of photos taken a few weeks ago.  The halt was opened by the GNR(I) in 1927 and was open for exactly 30 years, closing with the end of regular services on the former Irish North lines in 1957.  Although one imagines that with so many highly-placed contacts, Mr. Weaver and Auntie Hester may well have benefitted some 'unofficial' services at the halt until the complete closure of the final stretch of the Irish North, from Dundalk to Clones, in 1957.

The platform is, unusually, built in concrete, but this has meant that it has survived largely intact.  The railway crossing keeper's cottage also survives, with some alterations having been made.  The first of my photos roughly copies the angle of the historical IRRS photo.

Edited 5 hours ago by Patrick Davey