Castle Talbot, Blackwater, Co. Wexford

On the ground floor of this five-bay Wexford house they sit broad and generous; by the top storey they have shrunk to a tighter rhythm of three-over-six sashes, a deliberate optical trick that makes the building appear taller and more composed than its actual three storeys might suggest. It is the kind of detail that rewards standing back and looking properly, the sort of thing an eighteenth-century builder would have expected his gentry clients to notice and approve of. The house was set to look outward too, aligned across rolling ground towards a wooded artificial lake, so that the view from inside was as considered as the facade itself.

The house went up in 1753 for Mathew Talbot, who died in 1795, and it appears on Taylor and Skinner's road maps of Ireland in 1778, labelled simply as belonging to "Talbot Esquire". The Talbot family held it across several generations: William Talbot, a magistrate who died in 1849, and his relative Mathew Talbot are both recorded there in the 1830s, while Major William Talbot, who lived until 1861, made an unsuccessful claim to the Earldom of Shrewsbury in the mid 1850s. By 1863 the house stood vacant, at least according to one contemporary account, which also describes a small tower on the estate, improved at some point with battlements along its top, giving it the look of a folly. The house was occupied again by the time of the 1901 and 1911 census returns, with John Hyacinth Talbot, a magistrate and deputy lieutenant, listed as landowner into the twentieth century.

What survives is unusually complete for a house of this age and type. The doorcase is worked in silver-grey granite, rusticated pilasters rising to an ogee pediment over a fanlit panelled door, reached by three granite steps flanked by cast-iron bootscrapers cast in the shape of griffins. Around the back, the window openings fall into a tripartite arrangement with slender timber mullions, and inside, the original crown glass survives in places, its faint waviness and thickness at the centre a sign of the older, hand-spun method of glassmaking before plate glass took over. Carved timber surrounds frame the doors of the central hall, plasterwork still traces the ceiling cornice, and the grounds retain their walled garden and outbuildings, along with rendered gate piers topped with statues and wrought iron gates finished in spearhead ironwork, the whole ensemble still reading as a self-contained estate rather than a house alone.