Longford House, Chapel Street, Co. Sligo

The lead sheeting survives on the two-storey canted bay to the south, but the main roof and chimneystacks are gone entirely, leaving a shell that nonetheless keeps its architectural grammar remarkably legible: vermiculated quoins (stonework carved with a worm-eaten texture, a decorative device borrowed from Italian Mannerist masonry) give way above the first-floor string course to crisper V-jointed ashlar, and a corbelled limestone eaves cornice still runs the length of the building.

Built around 1782, the house was the seat of the Crofton family, whose standing in the district is written into every restrained, unornamented line of the design. The regularity of the window openings, square-headed and fitted with shouldered architraves, gives the facade a rhythmic quality typical of the classicism practised in Ireland's Georgian country houses, where proportion and repetition were valued over surface decoration. Two entrances survive as the building's most emphatic statements: a round-headed door to the west, flanked by narrow sidelights and set within a rusticated, channel-jointed surround, and, at first-floor level on the east front, a square-headed doorway framed by Doric columns, a frieze and a triangular pediment, an unusual arrangement that suggests a first-floor reception space of some formality. A full-height canted bay projects from the east elevation, and a pedimented tripartite window sits above the west entrance, ordering the facade even as the interior behind it has lost virtually all its original fabric. Beyond its architectural pedigree, Longford House held a wider social function in the locality, having provided employment for the surrounding region as the principal residence of its day, and its gateway, still announcing the property from the roadside, remains a distinct feature of the local landscape. A two-storey house, still occupied, stands to the north-east of the ruin.