Bloomville, Sranure, Co. Offaly

Nobody recorded where it came from. It sits now as an odd splinter of medieval work absorbed into a Georgian farmyard, a small archaeological puzzle wedged between limestone blocks that otherwise have nothing to do with it.

The house itself is a detached five-bay, two-storey building over a half-basement, put up around 1790, its plain rendered walls and regular window arrangement typical of the restrained country houses built across Ireland in that period. What lifts it above the ordinary is the doorway: a round-headed opening framed by a finely tooled limestone Gibbsian surround, a style named after the architect James Gibbs, whose device of alternating blocks of stone around a door or window became a favoured decorative flourish in eighteenth-century building. Above the door, a glazed fanlight; below, two limestone steps flanked by plinth walls. Around 1830 a bow-ended bay was added to the east, giving the otherwise symmetrical façade a curved projection lit by a large Wyatt window, itself named for the Wyatt family of architects who popularised the tripartite window with a curved or canted centre. A date, 1794, is worked into the weather slating at the base of one chimneystack, and it may mark when the new front section of the house was finished; the earliest known deed for the property is from 1789, so the building seems to have gone up in the years directly between. There are hints, too, that the house may incorporate an earlier structure at the rear, folded into the later plan rather than swept away.

Behind the house, the yard tells a different architectural story. The stables and outbuildings here date to around 1885, nearly a century after the main house, and their random coursed limestone walls with limestone quoins and moulded red brick around the doors and windows belong firmly to the taste of their own era, deliberately distinct from the smooth render and restraint of the Georgian building in front of them. An enclosed garden and orchard lie beyond the yard, and the house is reached along avenues approaching from the north-east and south-west, framed throughout by mature trees and parkland that soften the transition between the formal front of the house and its working spaces behind.