Ballyrankin House, Ballyrankin, Co. Wexford

Ballyrankin's granite columns once stood four-square in the Ionic manner, prostyle and tetrastyle in the language of classical architecture, meaning a freestanding row of four columns fronting the entrance rather than columns engaged in the wall behind them. That portico, and the diminishing scale of the window openings as the eye travels upward from ground floor to first floor, were once read as marks of a house "rebuilt with much taste", a phrase recorded in 1868 and attributed to the work of Major John Devereux. The care taken with alignment was equally deliberate: the house was set to command views over its own wooded grounds and the winding course of the River Slaney, a piece of landscape thinking as much as architecture.

The Devereux family's connection to Ballyrankin ran across generations, from Reverend Nicholas Devereux, who died in 1867, to Captain John Daly Devereux, whose will in 1898 still named the house as his address, and on to Reverend Nicholas Jessop Devereux, who by 1913 had moved to a rectory in Northamptonshire but was remembered in relation to the Wexford estate all the same. The house passed eventually to the Skrine family, Walter Clarmont Skrine and his wife Agnes, known as Nesta, whose daughter Mary Nesta Skrine grew up at Ballyrankin before becoming known to readers as the novelist and playwright Molly Keane. By then the house's fate was already sealed by events beyond family history: in July 1921, during the Irish War of Independence, a party of armed and masked men forced their way in and burned it, making Ballyrankin the first of County Wexford's country houses to be destroyed in that period of upheaval. The property had in fact already been leased in 1911 and sold in 1912, so the burning came after the Devereux tenure had formally ended, though the house remained bound up with their name in local memory.

What survives is a shell, roofless and open to the weather, its rendered walls softened under creeper and ivy, the granite doorcase and window surrounds still legible beneath the growth. The ogee-detailed pediments over the ground-floor windows and the hood mouldings above those on the first floor remain distinct enough to trace the original graduated composition, even with the interior long gone and the portico's columns reduced to fragments. Around the ruin, a walled garden and a pair of gate lodges survive as well, along with outbuildings, all still legible as parts of a single estate composition even as the house at its centre stands open to the sky.