Hollybrook House, Ballyhealy Or Hollybrook Demesne, Co. Sligo

The windows shrink in size as they rise, a common eighteenth-century trick that makes a facade look taller and more graceful than its actual proportions, and here it is carried out in a deep grey limestone worked with enough care that the effect still reads clearly despite decades of neglect. The roofline carries its own quiet flourish too, with paired ashlar chimney stacks capped in cut limestone and yellow terracotta pots, a detail easy to miss from the ground but part of the same deliberate, graduated composition.

Local tradition, recorded in the Ordnance Survey namebook of the 1830s, says the house was built in 1725 for John ffolliott, "the proprietor," and repaired in 1826; the architectural historian Mark Bence-Jones instead dated it to 1756, noting a Doric portico and a bracket cornice he attributed to nineteenth-century alteration. Either way, the house anchors an estate long associated with the ffolliott family, whose name recurs in probate records across more than a century: John ffolliott, who died in 1868; Lieutenant-Colonel John ffolliott and his wife Grace Charlotte, both described as "late of Hollybrook House" in wills proved in the 1890s and 1900s; and Margaret Zaida ffolliott, listed as a landowner in the 1911 census. The house was still occupied in 1901 and 1911, but the family's tenure ended within living memory of that, the property sold in 1945 and finally vacated in 1960, after which it slipped into the disused state it remains in today. A farmyard complex, a bow-ended walled garden already standing by 1837, and a gate lodge some distance off all belong to the same estate and still read as a group, even as the main house has faded around them.

Inside, despite the years of vacancy, a surprising amount survives. The central hall keeps its carved timber door surrounds and a black marble chimneypiece beneath a dentilated plasterwork cornice gathered around an acanthus-leaf ceiling rose, and the double-height staircase hall retains its dog-leg stair with slender turned balusters and a banister that curls into a volute at the foot. Several of the ground-floor reception rooms still have their timber panelled shutters, picture rails, and decorative plaster ceilings, each subtly different from the next, suggesting a house that was finished with real attention rather than assembled to a single repeated pattern. The grounds around it are now unkempt, the roof and render showing the strain of standing empty for over sixty years, but the underlying design, the proportion, the workmanship in the stone and plaster, is still legible to anyone willing to look past the neglect.