Saint Nathy's, Tullaghanmore, Co. Roscommon

High Victorian Gothic is not a style Roscommon has much of, and Saint Nathy's, formerly Edmondstown House, is a rare survival of it in the county: a building that reaches for the theatrical vocabulary of Gothic Revival architecture, all string courses and finials, in a landscape more usually associated with plainer Georgian houses.

The house was built in 1864 to designs by the architect John McCurdy, commissioned by Captain Arthur Costello, whose initials appear alongside the date on a carved stone plaque set into the front elevation. It was, for its time and place, an ambitious undertaking. The style McCurdy chose draws on the same architectural language associated with figures like Deane and Woodward and J.S. Mulvany, whose High Victorian work elsewhere in Ireland favoured polychromatic brick and stone, steep gables and picturesque massing over restraint. At Edmondstown House this shows in the snecked limestone walls banded with red brick at the window heads and sills, the pointed-arch openings framed in the same contrasting materials, and the octagonal corner tower rising from the south-facing elevation. A projecting gabled bay with canted bay windows breaks the front elevation, and a gabled porch, reached by limestone steps, shelters a timber double-leaf door flanked by sidelights. Cast-iron finials punctuate the patterned slate roofs, and cast-iron rainwater goods run alongside ashlar chimneystacks, small decorative flourishes that add up to a building clearly meant to be looked at rather than merely lived in.

Behind the house, a gable-fronted outbuilding and a two-storey structure with a limestone-dressed carriage arch and a cut limestone bellcote survive in the rear yard, hinting at the working life that once supported the house. The building's later use as a bishop's palace, whence the name Saint Nathy's derives, has left the Gothic fabric largely intact within its setting of mature parkland, the approach still made along the same winding driveway that would have brought Costello's Victorian visitors to the porch.