Ballydoogan House, Ballydoogan, Co. Galway

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Ballydoogan House, Ballydoogan, Co. Galway

What makes Ballydoogan House quietly unusual is what lies beneath it, historically speaking.

The eighteenth-century country house was built directly on the site of an earlier tower house, those tall, fortified stone residences that were the dominant form of aristocratic dwelling in medieval Ireland. The choice to build a refined Georgian pile on such a footprint was not uncommon in Connacht, but it does mean the house carries a kind of double life, the manners of one century overlaid on the bones of another.

The house itself dates to around 1760 and displays the formal vocabulary of that era with some care. The south-facing front elevation is three bays wide and rises two storeys over a raised basement, with a distinctive half-hexagon entrance bay projecting from the centre. The window surrounds follow what is known as the Gibbs style, with blocked and alternating stonework framing the openings, and the doorcase has fluted brackets beneath a segmental pediment. Cut limestone quoins sharpen the corners of the otherwise rendered façade, and the hipped slate roof is finished with modillion brackets at the eaves. Behind the main block, a second block of nearly equal size runs to the north, a rear elevation that is almost as considered as the front. A courtyard to that side, reached through an arched entrance in a stone screen wall, contains a variety of outbuildings. What complicates the picture is the house's more recent history. It was burnt in 1922, during the period of widespread destruction that accompanied the Irish Civil War, and rebuilt with modifications in 1929. The result is a structure that reads as Georgian but was substantially remade in the late 1920s, leaving the current fabric as something of a careful reconstruction rather than a straightforward survival. Together with the White Bridge, the Rock Bridge, and the entrance gates, the house forms a coherent demesne composition in the Galway landscape.

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