Coolamber, Boherquill, Co. Westmeath

It is the kind of small cartographic discrepancy that hints at a longer, less tidy history than the confident mid-Victorian façade lets on, a five-bay, two-storey house arranged on an L-shaped plan, its entrance front given weight by a cut stone Doric porch, four columns supporting a plain entablature in the manner favoured by architects of the period who wanted classical gravity without excessive ornament. Behind the porch, a timber doorcase with sidelights and a wide fanlight lets light spill into the hall, while sash windows with bracketed cornices at ground level and moulded architraves above give the regular façade its sense of calm, deliberate proportion.

The name Coolamber reaches back further than the current house. The Down Survey, that mid-seventeenth-century mapping exercise carried out under Sir William Petty to record land ownership after the Cromwellian conquest, marks a castle at this location, and Samuel Lewis, writing his topographical dictionary in 1837, notes that Coolamber was the site of an old castle besieged by Cromwell himself. Whatever stone or earthwork stood here in the 1650s has vanished beneath, or been replaced by, the house that followed. By the time Lewis was writing, the property belonged to S. W. Blackall, and a Robert Blackall is recorded holding twenty-seven acres at Coolamber around 1870, a modest estate by the standards of the county's larger landholders. The house passed through further hands in the twentieth century, purchased shortly after the Second World War by Prince Edward of Saxony, and remained with the Princess of Saxony until relatively recently, an improbable European aristocratic footnote to a building that began, if the old maps are to be believed, as a fortified position contested during the Cromwellian wars.

The house today stands within grounds that still read as a coherent estate landscape rather than a fragment of one: a walled garden and outbuildings sit to the rear, forming a group that has kept its relationships intact even as the house itself has fallen out of use. A canted bay window in ashlar limestone projects from the south elevation, and the hipped slate roof with its overhanging eaves and two ashlar chimneystacks gives the whole composition a settled, unhurried silhouette against the Westmeath countryside, one that owes as much to the castle it may have replaced as to the Doric porch that now announces it.