Shurock House, Shurock, Co. Westmeath

On one side stands a plain, three-bay single-storey house of the 1760s, its Classical doorcase still legible beneath the ivy: a limestone surround with heavy architraves, a projecting keystone carved with fish-scale detail, and a cut stone cornice riding above a pulvinated frieze, the term for a convex, cushion-like moulding often seen on Classical doorways. On the other side runs a Gothic wing added perhaps half a century later, its two towers, pointed-arched openings and clasping buttresses decorated with quatrefoil motifs, all executed with a slightly heavy hand that hints at a builder still working out the new style rather than a master of it.

The house was home to a Capt Homan around 1760, and later to Sir W Jackson-Homan, a barrister, recorded there in 1837. The gap between those two dates roughly brackets the building's transformation, from a modest Georgian gentleman's residence into something more theatrical, with the Gothic wing likely added around 1810 as fashion shifted away from Classical restraint towards romantic irregularity and pointed arches. Quadrant walls, curved screen walls linking the main block to flanking structures, still run from the Gothic block, punctuated with their own pointed-arched niches, and a complex of ruinous outbuildings survives to east and west, along with what was once the main entrance to the north.

Nothing here has been restored or tidied. The roof has collapsed entirely, ivy has taken much of the rubble limestone walling, and the square-headed window openings on the older section have been boarded rather than repaired, so what remains is a ruin in the fullest sense, its details only decipherable with some patience against the undergrowth. It stands north of Moate, a fragment of Westmeath's built heritage left to weather in place, its two architectural moods, one restrained and Classical, one exuberant and Gothic, still readable in the stone even as the structure around them continues to fall away.