Cullan Castle, Cloonaherna, Co. Clare

The walls stand in dressed stone, the string course between floors intact, the tripartite window on the front elevation still showing its moulded architrave and the columns that form its mullions, but there is nothing overhead, and the round-headed doorway, once flanked by pilasters and capped with a cornice and archivolt, has been blocked up. This is what remains of Cullan Castle, a name that belies its actual form: not a fortified tower house but a Georgian gentleman's residence, dated 1782, that has slipped gradually into ruin.

The house was built to a fairly ambitious plan for its date, three bays wide and two storeys over a basement, with a central breakfront giving the facade some depth and formality, and a full-height bowed section at the rear, a curved projection that would have let extra light into the rooms behind it. The window surrounds elsewhere on the building are rendered brick laid in a block-and-start pattern, alternating projecting and flush blocks to imitate stone quoining, a cheaper substitute for the carved masonry used on the more prominent breakfront. Around the house, the remnants of a small estate survive in fragments: a rubble stone chapel built for Roman Catholic worship, its lancet-arched openings, the tall narrow windows with pointed tops typical of Gothic Revival taste, now open to the sky; an L-plan gate lodge with a dormer attic, the kind of gatekeeper's cottage that once stood watch over the main approach, now derelict; and a gazebo on a stepped base, similarly reduced to its footings.

Taken together, the group tells a story less about a single building than about the slow disassembly of a whole domestic landscape, house, chapel, lodge and garden folly all falling out of use and into the same condition. The gazebo, in particular, is a reminder that pleasure grounds once accompanied the house, a place for the family to sit out and admire whatever prospect the estate afforded before it too was left to the weather. Nothing here has been restored, and the ruin is now as much a record of nineteenth and twentieth century decline as the 1782 datestone is a record of the house's beginnings.