Ardtarmon House, Ardtermon, Co. Sligo

A thatched farmhouse of around 1800 is joined directly to a much grander two-storey rendered house built roughly a century later, the two knitted together so that neither erased the other. It is unusual to find such a clear seam between vernacular and formal architecture on a single roofline; more often the earlier phase is demolished, absorbed beyond recognition, or left to collapse once a family's fortunes allowed for something larger. Here both stages survive legibly, each retaining its own roofing material, window type and detailing, so that the building reads almost like a cross-section through changing taste and status.

The thatched section is a good example of the ordinary farmhouse form common before the twentieth century: four bays under a single storey, a scalloped ridge to the thatch, squat chimneystacks and roughcast walling left unpainted, with plain sash windows and a simple timber door. The later main house, by contrast, is an early twentieth-century architectural statement, faced in render with straight quoins, a crenellated parapet and a mansard roof of artificial slate, its entrance marked by a fanlight with a sunburst pattern over double doors flanked by sidelights. Two projecting bays on the south and west elevations give the house a more sculptural, deliberately composed silhouette than the plain block behind it. At the road end of the drive stands a separate gate lodge, built in 1884, a modest three-bay single-storey building with a gabled porch and slate roof, its render and stone detailing marking it as a well-mannered piece of late Victorian estate architecture rather than a mere gatekeeper's cottage. Rubble stone boundary walls and rendered quadrant walls curve in toward the entrance gateway, framing the approach in the same materials used elsewhere on the site. The outbuildings to the east of the main house, built of rendered and rubble masonry, complete a working arrangement typical of a farmed estate where domestic, agricultural and access buildings were all considered part of one composition. The whole group has been restored under the care of the Irish Landmark Trust, an approach that has kept each phase of construction distinct and readable rather than smoothing the site into a single uniform appearance.