Classiebawn Castle, Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo

Yet Classiebawn Castle is exactly that, a house built to look like a fortress, standing on an elevated site above the sea with nothing around it to compete for attention.

The building dates to 1874 and was designed by Rawson Carroll, the architect also responsible for Sligo Courthouse, working for Lord Palmerston. Carroll chose the Scottish Baronial style, a nineteenth-century revival mode borrowed from Scots tower houses, characterised by turrets, bartizans and steep gables, and here it suits the exposed coastal setting rather well. The house is laid out on an L-plan, its east front anchored by the great tower and a gabled entrance breakfront, with a three-storey block to the south and a lower, dormered wing to the north; further gabled and parapeted ranges step down to the west before giving way to a single-storey service wing enclosed around a yard. Pointed-arch windows on the east front, including a continuous arcade of them at second floor level in the south block, soften the fortress-like massing with a Gothic note, while the main door is treated with particular care: a carved cartouche fills the spandrel above it, hood moulding with carved label stops crowns the arch, and stone colonettes with carved capitals flank the opening on square dados. The masonry throughout, squared-and-snecked rubble with dressed ashlar quoins and strings, reflects a level of workmanship unusual even among houses of this class, and it has survived largely intact.

Approach is by a long avenue running east from a gatelodge, through grounds extensive enough to give the tower time to reappear and vanish behind rises in the land before the house is finally seen in full. Its position, hard by the sea and raised above it, means the building announces itself from a considerable distance, the tower acting almost as a landmark for shipping and travellers alike long before any of the house's carved detail, the hood mouldings, the colonettes, the crested ridge tiles, comes into view.