Castlewilder, Castlewilder, Co. Longford

That mismatch is the clue to the house's history: the doorcase was almost certainly moved from its original position when a gable-fronted central bay was added to the front, probably in the 1880s, and the whole composition has been quietly rearranged around it ever since. Diminishing window openings, smaller at the top than the bottom in the old fashion, and overhanging eaves carried on timber brackets, point to a structure of real age beneath the later alterations, and the timber bargeboards and drop finial on the southeast gable suggest the roofline was reworked at the same time as the new bay went in.

The house takes its name from the Wilder family, who were established in County Longford by the mid-seventeenth century; a Matthew Wilder of Cliduff appears in the 1659 Census, and an Edward Wilder served as a soldier during the Irish Confederate Wars of 1649, which hints at an earlier house or castle on or near this site before the present building went up in the first decades of the eighteenth century. William Wilder, who lived from 1696 to 1745, held the house during that period and served as High Sheriff of County Longford in 1730, an office that passed down through the family, with a later Matthew Wilder holding the same post in 1774 and his son again in 1798. The house may also have been the home of Theaker Wilder, a mathematician and the first Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College Dublin, remembered chiefly now as Oliver Goldsmith's tutor, a role he apparently performed without much enthusiasm. Ownership passed to the Pollock family around 1823, and by 1837 Hugh Pollock was recorded as living there, with the surveyor Lewis noting that petty sessions, the local courts that handled minor legal business, were held at the house every alternate week. In 1845 the estate, comprising the house and 752 acres, was sold for £18,000 to Richard Pearce O'Reilly, a Dublin surgeon, whose son later served as High Sheriff of County Longford in 1867.

Approached from the road, the house stands well back and slightly elevated, with a complex of outbuildings still grouped to the north, the two together forming what remains a coherent piece of the local built landscape south of Legan and northeast of Abbeyshrule.