Kinlough House, Kinlough, Co. Leitrim

Walk the facade and the details resolve themselves slowly: round-headed recesses framing the ground floor windows, a scar in the stonework where a Doric portico once stood, and above it a tripartite window beneath a pediment, its flower motif carved into the stone with a delicacy that has outlasted the roof, the floors and the family who once looked out from behind it.

The house was built around 1800 by Robert Johnston and remained the Johnston family home for generations before falling into the ruin seen today. It follows a T-plan layout, five bays wide and two storeys over a basement, a substantial arrangement for the period. The walls are sandstone finished in ruled-and-lined render, a technique of scoring wet plaster to imitate cut ashlar blocks, while the quoins and string courses are tooled limestone, adding a crispness to the corners and horizontal lines of the building. Two ashlar chimneystacks, each marked with their own string courses, rise above what remains of the structure. At basement level, segmental-arched openings, their curved tops flatter than a full semicircle, are still fitted with cast-iron railings, a detail that has survived the loss of the roof and much of the interior above.

Set back from the town, the house occupies a position that once let its architecture read clearly against the surrounding countryside, and even in ruin the composition still asserts itself: the proportion of the bays, the rhythm of the windows, the ghost of a portico that once announced the entrance. It is a building whose quality was evidently meant to be seen from a distance as much as approached closely, and that intention has not entirely faded with the roof.