Edgeworthstown House, Dublin Road, Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford

Walk the façade and the confusion is written into the stonework itself: box bay windows sit where curved, bowed windows once projected, the result of an owner who treated his home less as a fixed structure than as an ongoing experiment. Five bays now stand where three once did, and a Doric porch, its four cast-iron columns supporting a moulded cornice, anchors a front elevation that has been added to, altered, and reworked so many times that its original plan is genuinely difficult to read.

The house dates to around 1725, built by Richard Edgeworth, and may even fold in the fabric of an earlier dwelling put up on the site by his father Francis around 1695. But the building's real character comes from Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744 to 1817), a descendant with an unusually restless mind: an inventor, cartographer, and mathematician who also dabbled in architecture, treating the house as something to be tinkered with rather than left alone. His alterations through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries account for much of what stands today, including the swap from bowed windows to the box bays now visible. It was during this period that the house became a literary crossroads of sorts, home to his daughter Maria Edgeworth, the novelist, and a stop for visitors including Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and Oliver Goldsmith. Further changes came around 1870, and outbuildings to the northeast were remodelled around 1884. The Edgeworth family connection held until 1925, when the house passed to Mrs C.F. Montague, a relative, before being sold in 1935 to a Mr Noonan. During the Second World War, Irish Army units occupied the building, an interlude before Noonan donated the house and fifty acres to the Sisters of Mercy around 1947. A modern chapel was added to the rear in 1982, designed by Robinson, Keefe and Devane, by which time the house had long since begun its current life as a nursing home.

The building sits within its own grounds southeast of Edgeworthstown, enclosed by wrought-iron railings, with a gateway and gate lodge to the west marking the original approach. What survives is not a museum piece frozen at a single moment but a working structure whose layered history, Georgian bones under Victorian and twentieth-century additions, rewards a slow look at the details: the render surrounds and painted stone sills of the square-headed windows, the hipped slate roofs with their copper ridge capping, and that Doric porch, still the visual anchor Richard Lovell Edgeworth's descendants would recognise, however much has changed around it.