Middleton House, Middleton, Co. Longford

The building is long and narrow, with stocky chimneystacks and a pitched roof that hint at real age, yet the front elevation carries the large square-headed windows typical of the nineteenth century. Stranger still, the rear wall is entirely blank, no windows at all, an arrangement so unusual that it suggests the house once had a rear return, a projecting wing common in Irish houses of this type, or that the surviving fabric is older than it first appears. The entrance, meanwhile, has clearly been given special treatment: a round-headed doorway framed by a carved limestone Gibbsian surround, its architrave stepped in the manner associated with the eighteenth-century architect James Gibbs, sits almost as a flourish on an otherwise plain front.

The documented story begins with a house on this site in the 1700s, though what stands today is understood to be a later addition built onto an earlier southern portion that was demolished in the early twentieth century. Ownership is tied to the Montfort family, Huguenots, French Protestants who left France to escape religious persecution, who are said to have bought Middleton around 1764. A Pierre de Montfort had served as a lieutenant in the army of William III and settled in County Longford in 1702, and his descendants went on to acquire the Middletown estate around 1750. The family's presence is traceable through the later eighteenth century, when a Montfort Esquire held the residence around 1777 to 1783, and into the nineteenth, when Henry Montfort still owned it in 1846. By 1900 the estate had passed out of the family's hands, and it was around this period that the older southern end of the house was pulled down, leaving the building's proportions subtly unbalanced, extended by a bay at some point, as the positioning of the chimneystacks still shows.

Around the house, several other features reward attention. A two-storey rubble stone outbuilding stands to the rear, reached by an external stone staircase to its upper floor, and a stretch of rubble stone wall nearby, pierced with loop hole openings, appears to be the surviving fragment of a demolished structure connected to a walled garden. To the northwest, an entrance gateway with chamfered limestone gate posts, wrought-iron double gates and a separate pedestrian turnstile marks the formal approach, set at the end of a long avenue leading in from the east. The house itself sits back from the road in mature grounds south of Cloondara, its front partly obscured by ivy, a quiet survival of a Huguenot family's century and a half in this corner of the country.