Clooncallow House, Clooncallow, Co. Longford

The windows either side were widened at the same time, so what began as a modest gentry house with a pitched roof, attic storey and chimneystacks tight to the gable ends was given a more fashionable, symmetrical face some eighty years later, without ever quite losing its earlier bones. Built over a basement, with an L-shaped plan and a two-storey return to the rear, it is the kind of building that repays a second look, since the alteration reads less as replacement than as improvement.

The Murray family of Clooncallow can be traced back to the mid-eighteenth century; a memorial at Forgney Church of Ireland church, to the east, commemorates Bryan Murray, described as ‘late of Clooncallow’, who died in 1778 aged 78. A lease for the lands survives from 1743, raising the possibility that a house stood here not long afterwards, though it is not certain that the present structure is that early. Bryan’s son Daniel Murray (1750 to 1830) served as High Sheriff of Longford in 1808 and sat as a Grand Juror for the county into the 1810s, and later Murrays, William T. and William, appear as occupants and Grand Jurors through the 1830s and 1840s. Financial trouble seems to have caught up with the family around 1859 or 1860, when an insolvency case involving the Murrays came before the Landed Estate Courts, a system set up to allow encumbered properties to be sold off. By 1881 the house had passed to John Shaw, a Justice of the Peace with a genuinely unusual career; born nearby at Rath Lodge, he had served as Governor of Lagos in West Africa in 1874 to 1875, then as Colonial Treasurer and Justice of the Peace in Sierra Leone until 1880, the same year he is thought to have taken up residence at Clooncallow, which may explain the timing of the porch and window alterations.

The house still sits within a wider group that gives a sense of how the estate once functioned: a main entrance gate to the south, a complex of outbuildings, a walled garden to the rear, and a curious tower-like structure just to the west of the house itself. Set back from the road in mature grounds with a gravel forecourt, and bounded by a mix of rubble limestone walls and wrought-iron railings, the whole arrangement lies to the east of Ballymahon and forms one coherent piece of the local landscape rather than a single isolated building.