Altidore Castle, Altidore Demesne, Co. Wicklow

From the driveway, with an octagonal castellated tower rising from each corner, the house presents itself as a fortress, all battlements and defensive posture. Step closer, though, and the illusion softens: the symmetry is too neat, the proportions too calm, the front door too finely detailed for anything built with siege warfare in mind. This is a toy castle, a category of late Georgian country house that borrowed the silhouette of medieval fortification while remaining, underneath, a thoroughly classical building dressed up for effect.

Built around 1780, the house is a seven-bay, two-storey structure over a basement, though the falling ground means it reveals a third storey at the rear, a common trick of siting on uneven terrain. The rendered front, finished with stone and moulded dressings, centres on a three-bay breakfront where a Gibbsian surround (a doorcase with alternating blocks of stone framing the opening, named after the architect James Gibbs) sits beneath a flat-roofed portico, with a Venetian window rising above it on the first floor. The hipped roof, slated in natural stone, completes a composition that is really an exercise in classical restraint wearing castellated fancy dress. For much of the nineteenth century the house belonged to the Dopping-Hepenstal family, though ownership did not mean occupation; they leased it out for long stretches rather than living there themselves, a pattern common enough among Irish landed families whose main interests, or main residences, lay elsewhere. One particularly telling trace of this tenanted life survives in a letterhead dated 20th April 1905, which shows the building operating as a tuberculosis sanatorium under the name "Altadore Sanatorium", its spelling slightly adrift from the house's own. Sanatoria of this kind, relying on clean air and quiet surroundings as much as on medicine, found country houses like this one well suited to their purpose, remote enough for rest, grand enough to reassure paying patients.

Approach is still through a long driveway, framed at its start by decorative wrought-iron gates set between square panelled pillars, leading up through mature garden ground to the house at its head. It is worth pausing at that entrance to notice how the towers and battlements read as castle from a distance, then dissolve into ordinary sash-windowed domesticity as the drive draws nearer, the whole effect calculated for exactly that shift in perception.