Country houses of this kind occupied a particular and often uneasy role in the Irish landscape, built to project permanence and landed authority, yet frequently outlasting the social order that produced them by only a generation or two. Many were abandoned, demolished, or gutted during the upheavals of the early twentieth century, and what survives in counties like Galway is often fragmentary, a roofless shell, a stable yard, a stretch of demesne wall running into scrub.