Creevaghmore, Creevaghmore, Co. Longford

The doorcase beneath is the real surprise: a heavily worked Gibbsian surround, named for the architect James Gibbs, whose signature treatment of chunky stone blocks framing a door became fashionable in the early eighteenth century, but rendered here in an unusually bold and almost provincial version of the style. Set against roughcast walls and a plain U-plan farmhouse silhouette, the effect is of high classical ambition grafted onto an ordinary working house, and it is this tension, formality up front, practicality behind, that makes Creevaghmore worth pausing over.

The house is generally dated to around 1750, though its history reaches back further. The Sandys family were established here from the mid-seventeenth century; a Simon Sandys appears in the 1659 census, and Freke Sandys received a land grant in Longford in 1663 before being appointed a Commissioner for the county by King William III in 1699. That long occupation suggests the present building replaced an earlier house on or near the same spot, and some scholars have proposed a late-seventeenth century date, pointing to window proportions comparable to Springhill in County Derry, built around 1680, though Springhill lacks a pediment. The architectural historian Maurice Craig noticed something else: the U-shaped plan, with lean-to sections linking the wings to the rear and the staircase and service rooms arranged to face the farmyard, closely matches a design published in John Payne's "Twelve Designs for Country Houses" in 1757. Since Creevaghmore appears to predate that publication, Craig suggested the layout reflected a farmhouse plan already in common use before it ever reached print. Later generations of Sandys held the house, including William Sandys, who served as High Sheriff of Longford in 1758, and Robert Sandys, recorded here in the 1830s and 1840s. The estate seems to have changed hands around 1854, and by 1881 a Charles Webb was living there.

Behind the house, a courtyard complex of outbuildings survives, along with an entrance gateway and boundary walls that form part of the same historic group, including a high rubble stone wall thought to have originally enclosed a walled garden. Together they form one of the more complete surviving assemblies of an early eighteenth-century farming estate in County Longford, the kind of ensemble that rarely comes down intact, since outbuildings and garden walls are so often lost even where the main house endures.