The above magazine cover from 1923 featuring two of the Beresford sisters from Curraghmore, namely Lady Blanche (left) and Lady Katharine, one year her junior. Daughters of Lady Beatrix Frances Petty-FitzMaurice and Henry de la Poer Beresford, the sixth Marquis of Waterford, their four siblings included the seventh, John.

Blanche, who married military peer Richard Girouard in England in 1927, became a mother of three and a noted novelist before she was tragically killed in a car accident in Surrey in 1940, aged 41.

Katharine, also an accomplished horsewoman, married her cousin, future Major-General David Dawnay, son of her aunt Susan (née Beresford) and the late Major-General Hugh Dawnay, amid much fanfare at Curraghmore in 1926.

They had four children, including twin brothers who were born in India whilst the family were based there with the British Army in 1932. However, Hugh and Peter were christened at Whitfield Court, Kilmeaden, where the family frequently stayed.

In 1948, a year after Whitfield’s owner, Lady Susan Dawnay (71) died unexpectedly, Katharine and her much-travelled husband, who inherited the 500-acre County Waterford estate, moved here from Badminton, England.

Tragically and remarkably, their daughter, also named Blanche (older sister of Rachel and the boys), lost her life in a motor crash in Copenhagen in the autumn of 1953. She was just 25. A memorial service was held in Kilmeaden Church of Ireland that September.

Her father, David, who captained the British polo team at the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936, winning a silver medal, died in 1971, aged 68. Katharine was in her 92nd year when she passed away in 1991; her other daughter, sadly, having predeceased her, at 54, in 1983.

Katharine was survived by Peter (a successful publisher and family in Somerset) and, having lived with them at Whitfield, Hugh, his wife Maria Ines, and their sons David and Sebastian.

Hugh, an army major, international polo player and coach, died in 2012. He had become joint-master of the Waterford Foxhounds in the mid-seventies, five decades after his mother and aunt shared that distinction for a few seasons, and made the front of The Bystander.

A year between the sisters, little did they think then that they would die half a century apart.