JOUN

Joun, Seat of Lady Hester Stanhope

Seven and a half miles northeast of Sidon and north of the Awali River lies the earthquake-ruined village of Joun, on a fertile, olive-tree-covered hilltop amid sterile white chalk hills. About 20 or 25 minutes' walk down a ravine and up onto another hilltop to the northwest of Joun brings the traveller to the lonely, pathetic remains of Lady Hester Stanhope's once-great baronial establishment, where William Pitt's niece held court as the "Sitt", or Lady of Joun, during the early decades of the 19th Century.

Several of the biographies of Lady Hester give the floor plan of this manor and a distant view of it as seen from the southwest, and these show us the extent of the buildings, whose upkeep eventually ruined the Sitt financially and left her hopelessly in debt to the Syrian money-lenders. Dahr el Sitt, as the place is still called, had, until the March, 1956, earthquake, about a dozen habitable rooms, the dungeon, and its vast underground cisterns, plus considerable stretches of the fortress-like wall which once surrounded the whole complex or compound.

This text is from Bruce Condès "See Lebanon - Over 100 Selected Trips, With History and Pictures". Harab Bijjani Press, Beirut, Lebanon 1960