Ballindoon House, Kingsborough, Co. Sligo

Ballindoon House sits above Lough Arrow with its scatter of small islands and a line of hills beyond, and the house is arranged so that this vista is never incidental. The compact cruciform plan is anchored by a portico on the entrance front and, on the garden side, a bowed breakfront topped with a dome, a pairing that turns the building into a kind of hinge between arrival and outlook.

The design has long been attributed to John Nash, the London architect responsible for grand Regency set pieces, but the attribution is probably more romantic than accurate. A more careful reading places Ballindoon later, around the 1850s, and sees it as a house inspired by Nash's Rockingham rather than one from his own hand. Either way, the detailing supports a serious architectural ambition: a pedimented Doric portico with four columns raised on a platform reached by stone steps, a frieze carved with triglyphs, and, on the garden front, tripartite sash windows with slender timber mullions dividing the glazing into margined panes. Inside, the entrance hall is unusual for its pierced quatrefoil plan, a four-lobed shape more often seen in tracery than in domestic floor plans, ringed with carved timber door surrounds and a plaster cornice on a beamed ceiling. The house was recorded as occupied in both 1901 and 1911, and its later history threads through the Gethin family, among them John Gethin, described in his will as a gentleman of Ballindoon and of Kingstown near Dublin, and Colonel John Percy Gethin after him. By the mid twentieth century the house had passed to Hubert Edward Philip Baden-Powell, known as Peter, and his wife Dorothy, recorded in 1970 as living at Ballindoon House, though a newspaper of the day mistakenly placed it in County Roscommon rather than Sligo.

What survives is remarkably complete for a house of this age: original joinery, plasterwork, timber shutters on panelled risers, and cast-iron rainwater hoppers in octagonal and ogee patterns still fixed beneath a dentilated cornice. The estate keeps its supporting cast too, outbuildings, a walled garden, a boathouse with a tin roof down by the lough, and a gate lodge some distance off, all of which continue to read as part of a single composition rather than isolated survivals. The perimeter is marked by cast-iron octagonal piers with polygonal caps carrying wrought iron gates, a modest but telling detail of how deliberately the whole demesne was once laid out around that long view over the water.