Manor House, Greencastle, Co. Donegal

It is the kind of architectural gesture that turns a solid, six-bay country house into something more particular, a building designed as much to be looked out from as to be looked at. The timber sliding sash windows survive throughout, six-over-three at first floor, two-over-two at ground level to the front, and the sober roughcast walls are lifted by an ashlar stringcourse at ground level, a band of finer cut stone that marks the base of the house like a drawn line. Round at the north-east side, where visitors would actually have arrived, the mood shifts: a gable-fronted timber porch with pierced bargeboards and slender pilasters, a small piece of decorative carpentry doing the work of a welcome on what is otherwise the service side of the building.

The house was built around 1853 for the McClellan family, one of several properties in the area connected with that name. Directories place a Revd. Thomas McClellan in residence in 1881 and 1894, and a Miss McClellan by 1910, before the property passed to the Wright family in the mid-twentieth century. Its construction coincides with the years when Greencastle and neighbouring Moville were developing as seaside resorts for the merchant and professional classes of Derry, reachable in summer by steam packet boats that ran regularly down the lough. A house like this, sited deliberately for its outlook, belongs to that particular moment when a water view became something worth building a facade around rather than simply enduring. The original natural slate roof has since been replaced with artificial slate, but the change is minor enough that it does little to disturb the overall composition; the three rendered chimneystacks with their decorative clayware pots still punctuate the roofline much as they would have done in the McClellans' day.

The house does not stand alone. A former coach house sits to the north-west and a gate lodge to the north-east, with rendered gate piers and boundary walls marking the original entrance from that side, and together these outbuildings complete a small estate composition rather than a single isolated structure. Set well back from the road within mature grounds, the house is still oriented, as it always was, towards the water below.