How I plan to live for ever

“I like to believe that, before I die, there would be a tree with Tullynally stuck on it,” says the 77-year-old arborist, historian and amateur photographer, who does not use his peerage title.

Tullynally is the name of his estate: a beautiful amalgam of woodlands, dairy farms, gardens and rolling green expanses 2km from Castlepollard. He inherited it from his childless uncle, Edward Pakenham, a former chairman of the Gate theatre. The sixth Earl of Longford (Thomas’s father was the seventh) died earlier than expected and Pakenham, who had grown up in a suburban home outside Oxford with seven siblings (including the writers Rachel Billington and Antonia Fraser), became the owner at the age of 27.

He planted trees for both aesthetic and commercial reasons, and in 1996 wrote Meetings with Remarkable Trees, a photography book about species found in Britain and Ireland. Pakenham says it sold some 250,000 copies, to the astonishment of publishers who had been reluctant to let the author branch out from books on African wars. Three more books on trees followed, and his photographs are being exhibited at the Molesworth Gallery in Dublin this week.

Research has sent him all over the world. He went to the small village of Lorton in England’s Lake District in search of the plant William Wordsworth immortalised in the opening line of the poem Yew Trees. Villagers told him the tree had blown down but, while walking by a stream in the area, Pakenham stumbled across a huge yew shattered with age. He checked with Wordsworth experts and, sure enough, this was the poet’s muse. Pakenham says its neglect was typical of a waning interest in the plants.

“About 1900, just before the car; that was probably the climax of popular interest in trees. I suppose people used wood much more than now, before plastics,” he says.

“People in the countryside would have known the difference between all the obvious woods. You needed to know, if a branch fell off an old walnut, that it made a stop for your gun. If an ash blew down, it would be the handle of your spade. Nowadays that expertise has largely disappeared.”

Pakenham is optimistic that his book sales signify a renewed interest in the topic; he has received bundles of letters from “fellow tree-huggers” praising his fascination.

“You get a lot of batty letters, but one of the nicest was from America after the second book, saying, ‘You speak for the trees.’ That was an extraordinary sentence to receive. It never struck me that I might speak for the trees, but it was a wonderful idea,” he says.

When he took over the Westmeath estate in the 1960s, Pakenham set up a dairy farm; started growing trees for timber (there are now 40,000 crop trees, mainly spruces); and stopped the practice of live-in employees. They have two gardeners, a part-time housekeeper and an assistant. However, the biggest change was reversing the house’s name from Pakenham Hall to Tullynally Castle, the title it carried before his family’s arrival 350 years ago.

“It had been Pakenham a long time, but I didn’t think the weight of the centuries would prevent me,” he says. “I just thought Tullynally was an attractive Irish name and I didn’t find I wanted to share my own name with a house. I was criticised, of course. Older generations of the family thought I was a bit dotty. I was blamed both ways — for continuing to call myself Pakenham and not calling myself Lord Anything, and failing to call the house Pakenham.”

There are further shake-ups down the line, such as an end to the family tradition of primogenital inheritance. “You may think it humbug, but I have always told my children that it shan’t happen to them. I certainly shan’t create a trust in which one gets the lot. It’ll be divided. Of course, there are great implications. Can it survive if you divide it up? These are big questions.”

Pakenham was raised by a Labour MP father, Francis Pakenham, and a London-born mother: “He converted her to Catholicism; she converted him to socialism.” He says living in Ireland and having an Irish passport is partly why he does not use his peerage title.

“What would the dividends be? I believe you can get a table more easily in a fashionable restaurant, but I can’t think of any others,” he says. “To me they’re anachronisms, like wearing fancy dress or something. That I live in a republic, titles seem to be even more absurd. To have an English peerage in Ireland seems to be even more absurd than having it in Surrey or Tunbridge Wells.”

Still, growing up in British high society had its benefits. He attended the “coming-out” parties of many young, upper-class women, encountering the late Elizabeth Taylor at one such event. The actress danced in circles around him and, although she was only a year older, all Pakenham remembers is thinking she looked “terribly old”.

Over lunch, he recalls the balls of “four plain daughters” of an English duke. His wife, Valerie, nods, having undoubtedly heard such stories before. They are lively and engaging company, squabbling over who remembers what correctly and who read what fully. An argument over a Yeats poem ends in Pakenham heading upstairs to find the book.

The poem, In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz, unfolds in Lissadell and this brings them on to the recent court ruling granting public right of way through the Sligo estate. Pakenham calls the decision “tragic” and his wife says it will have implications for their estate. Tullynally gardens are officially open in the summer, but the Pakenhams have always let people stroll around the grounds all year round. However, they recently put up a sign saying “access by permission only” and closed the grounds one week a year to assert their ownership.

It is costly to keep the big house running but they are dedicated owners. “We live in it in a slightly eccentric way with great parts of it unheated,” Pakenham says. “That would be one of the most expensive parts of a big house. We heat bedrooms on the first floor of the main block. There are six flats in the old servant wings, two of them are occupied by two of our four children and four of them are let commercially, so we get an income that way. I think that’s essential for an old house.”

Last year, hundreds of letters written during the Great Famine were withdrawn on the eve of their auction in Dublin. They had been stolen from Tullynally 20 years earlier. The alleged thief was a guest at one of the flats. “We really don’t know the full extent of the theft,” says Pakenham. “I believe [the thief] is now in hospital in America. It was all very painful. His father and mother, a retired couple, lived here and were friends, so the whole thing was painful for them and us.”

The papers are still in police custody, though Pakenham hopes they will be returned to Tullynally’s archive room. For his next publication, he will be writing as an historian but the subject will again be trees. After 20 years, he remains fascinated. He rolls an old tree stump into the scullery, which now acts as a conservatory, and demonstrates how to calculate its age by counting rings. He has marked each decade with a nail. Its appearance draws a wry look from Valerie. “Only people with a lot of time on their hands can do that,” she says, carrying cutlery from the table to the kitchen.

A walk around the property is like reading his memoir. Each tree has a personal history. There are ones planted for his grandchildren, a copper beech from which a tree surgeon fell before climbing up to continue his job, and a circular room made from oak called “the womb with a view”. Finally, there is the Himalayan birch, which might one day spawn the Tullynally — a title Pakenham will happily claim.