Correen Castle, Correen, Co. Roscommon

It was raised in 1833 as a country house, yet its builders dressed it in the language of medieval fortification: a castellated parapet lined with crenels and merlons, blind arrow loops set into the rendered façade, a tower-like breakfront that suggests, without quite committing to, the multiple angled walls of a genuine fortified keep. None of it defends anything. The effect is theatrical rather than military, a costume of stone thrown over a domestic building, and it is all the more interesting for being so.

The house belongs to a wave of nineteenth-century design in which the middle ages were less a period to be studied than a mood to be conjured. That romantic sensibility carries through to the interior, where a heavy timber door with cast-iron furniture opens onto a double-height entrance hall complete with a minstrels gallery, the raised balcony from which musicians would traditionally have played down into a great hall. Here it serves no such function; it exists to complete the illusion, giving visitors the sense of stepping into a baronial world that was already centuries out of reach even in 1833. Below, flagstones and a brick wine cellar occupy the basement, while to the rear a three-storey return and a plainer two-storey extension, added around 1940, show the house adapting itself over time without disturbing the fantasy at the front.

Behind the house, screened from the main approach, the illusion falls away entirely. A derelict farmyard survives here, its buildings ruinous but still legible, enclosed by roughcast-rendered walls and reached through a tall wrought-iron gate. A water pump and well remain in the yard alongside a more modern outbuilding, the practical machinery of an estate that once had to feed and water itself quite apart from whatever picturesque impression it presented to guests arriving at the front door. It is a useful reminder that behind even the most self-consciously romantic country houses there was, almost always, a working farm doing the unglamorous business of keeping the place running.