Markree Castle, Markree Demesne, Co. Sligo

What sets this one apart is the accumulation of styles fused onto a single façade: a battlemented tower with machicolations (projecting stonework with gaps through which defenders once dropped missiles, though here purely decorative), an oriel window jutting out on two storeys, a chapel, a porte-cochere, and a canted bay window, all added long after the original structure went up. The south front alone keeps its composure, a harmoniously balanced elevation that belies the architectural layering happening everywhere else around it.

The building began around 1802, incorporating fabric from earlier houses on the site, a common pattern in Irish country house architecture where new fashions were grafted onto older cores rather than starting from scratch. The real transformation came around 1870, when the house was extensively enlarged and remodelled in the Gothic Revival manner, a nineteenth century movement that looked back to medieval forms, pointed arches, and castellated silhouettes as a reaction against classical restraint. Francis Johnston, Wardrop, and Francis Goodwin all had a hand in the design, three architects whose combined work produced the tower, the chapel, and the two-storey wing to the east. A further ornamental doorway was added to the garden front in 1896, its pointed arch set beneath a battlemented canopy, with carved sandstone spandrels and pink granite colonettes flanking the reveals, opening onto a semi-circular double perron, a curved outdoor staircase leading down into the terraced garden.

Much of what makes the place worth lingering over is in the detail rather than the overall silhouette: leaded stained glass with traceried patterns and limestone hood moulds above the porte-cochere and chapel windows, an ogee-headed door opening (its arch rising to a point through a double curve) set within limestone flags and timber panelled doors, and diagonally-set corbelled chimneystacks in dressed limestone rising above a parapet that hides the roofline almost entirely from view. The demesne around the house carries its own architectural language, with crenellated limestone boundary walls and a turreted gateway at the north-west entrance, signalling the scale of parkland that once surrounded what has functioned, in more recent years, as a hotel rather than a private residence.