Rathrobin, Mountbolus, Co. Offaly

A house called Rathrobin stood here from 1694, built by Nicholas Biddulph, son of John, son of Francis. Then, around 1898, a second Rathrobin rose on the same ground, an altogether grander composition designed by the Dublin architect Sir Thomas Drew for Lieutenant-Colonel Middleton Westenra Biddulph and his wife Vera Josephine. Both houses are gone in different ways: the first only as a name recorded on old deeds, the second as a burnt-out shell that still holds its shape against the Offaly sky.

Drew's house was a confident piece of design dressed in an unusual technique. Behind its silver-grey limestone detailing and simulated ashlar finish lay mass concrete construction, an early and somewhat experimental choice for a country house of this period. The plan was angular, built around a buttressed porch, with window openings that diminished in scale as they rose through the two storeys and dormer attic, giving the façade a tiered, almost telescoping rhythm. A polygonal bow marked out the principal reception rooms, and pinnacles studded the multi-gabled roofline. It was occupied through the 1901 and 1911 censuses, a working household on the family's ancestral land, before the violence of the War of Independence and Civil War years reached it. Brigadier William "Bill" Magan, writing in his 1983 memoir Umma-More, recorded the burning of Rathrobin in 1923, one of many big houses destroyed during that unsettled period. The Biddulph connection to the townland runs deeper still, back through Francis Marsh Biddulph and Lucy Biddulph, whose wills describe them as late of Rathrobin, Blueball, Tullamore.

What remains is a roofless carcass, but a legible one. The rendered, ruled-and-lined concrete walls still stand on their overgrown plinth, capped with finial-topped limestone coping at each gable. Tudor-headed doorways survive, one leading into the porch, one into the house proper, both retaining their moulded limestone surrounds and hood mouldings, though every window has lost its glass and fittings. Nearby, outbuildings incorporate stonework salvaged from the late medieval Rathrobin Castle, a physical link between the site's several building phases, while an adjoining walled garden adds to the sense of a once self-contained estate now given over to unkempt grounds and creeping vegetation. Little of the interior plasterwork survives beyond fragments, but even in ruin the massing and proportion of Drew's design remain readable against the sky.