Mountshannon House, Shannon Eighter, Co. Sligo

It is an unusual feature for a house of this size and date, and it is worth pausing on why. The end bays of the portico are left open to the air, while the centre has been closed in to form an enclosed porch, so that what began as a piece of architectural theatre also does the practical work of sheltering a front door. Steps rise to it from the south-west, and the whole arrangement sits over a basement, giving the entrance a raised, almost ceremonial quality that the plain rubble limestone walling elsewhere on the house does not lead you to expect.

Built around 1820, Mountshannon House is a double-pile, three-bay, two-storey-over-basement mansion with hipped slate roofs and a working farmyard's worth of history behind it. The Census of Ireland for 1911 recorded fourteen separate outbuildings attached to the property, among them a stable, coach houses, a harness room, a cow house, a diary, a fowl house, a barn, a turf house and a potato house, a list that reads like an inventory of a self-sufficient rural estate rather than a single dwelling. Some of that fabric survives in the two-storey outbuilding ranges that still flank the yard to the north, built in matching rubble limestone with pitched artificial slate roofs. Not everything has lasted: a conservatory that once projected from the east elevation was blown down in a storm around 1950 and now survives only as a remnant. The house itself was converted into private apartments around 1986, a change of use common enough for large Irish country houses in the later twentieth century, though here it has left the original sash windows, brick dressings and limestone sills largely intact.

Approached by a driveway from the south through a wooded setting, the house is preceded by a single-storey, three-bay gate lodge with a hipped slate roof and dry-dashed walls, its eaves given a decorative lift by hanging enrichments beneath the projecting roofline. Beyond the lodge stands a gate screen with wrought-iron carriage and pedestrian gates hung between rubble limestone piers topped with ashlar caps; eagles perch on the central piers, and lamps, added around 1990, sit on the outer ones. Together the lodge and gateway form a small sequence of arrival that still hints at how a visitor in the 1820s would have been led, gradually, toward that startling Doric front.