Scregg House, Scregg, Co. Roscommon

Look up at the first floor and there is a Venetian window, three lights grouped together with a rounded arch over the centre pane; higher again, at attic level, sits a Diocletian window, the semicircular form named after the Roman emperor's baths and divided by stone mullions into three sections. Both openings are dressed in silver-grey limestone chiselled to a fine finish, and both diminish slightly in scale from floor to floor, a deliberate trick of proportion that makes the five-bay front seem taller and more composed than its actual dimensions would suggest.

The house was built in 1769 by Edmund Kelly (1736 to 1802), and a weathered stone panel bearing the Kelly coat of arms still carries the inscription "TURRIS FORTIS MIHI DEUS", God is a strong tower to me, along with the date. Its design echoes the Kelly family's other seat, Ballybaun House across the county boundary in Galway, and the same appetite for scenic siting is visible here, the building set to look out over its own grounds rather than merely to face a road. The estate passed out of Kelly hands when John Edmund Crofton Kelly put it up for sale through the Encumbered Estates Court in 1856, a body set up to force the sale of Irish estates whose owners had fallen into unmanageable debt after the Famine. Census returns confirm the house was still occupied in 1901 and 1911, by which time a second, unrelated Kelly family, headed by James Kelly, land steward and farmer, was managing the property on behalf of the Potts family of Correen Castle. An outbuilding nearby carries the initials of Henry Trumperant Potts and a date of 1860, and, oddly, that same outbuilding incorporates two carved Sheela-na-gigs, the grotesque female figures found on many Irish medieval buildings, taken from the ruins of Scregg Castle.

Inside, the central hall keeps its carved timber door surrounds and a decorative plasterwork cornice worked in an egg-and-dart pattern, while a dog-leg staircase, its turns tucked back on themselves rather than running straight, rises on slender timber colonettes to a banister that finishes in a carved volute. The grounds around the house have gone unkempt, but the entrance piers survive, rusticated limestone capped with ogee cornices and pear-drop finials, still hung with their original wrought iron gates.