Daly's Grove, Dalysgrove, Co. Galway

A plain, rendered Georgian block of the 1780s runs into a taller, later addition of around 1840, and the two refuse to agree on anything: roofline, wall finish, window shape, even the mood they were built to project. Where the earlier front presents square-headed windows and a wide doorway that once held a fanlight and sidelights, the rear block answers with round-headed windows, a crenellated parapet propped on stone corbels, and bowed bays curving out on either side of a gabled centre. It reads less like an extension than an argument in stone between two generations of the same family.

The contrast is the whole story of the place. Country houses of this kind were rarely built in a single campaign; they accumulated, and Daly's Grove happens to preserve both ends of that process with unusual clarity. The c.1780 block belongs to the restrained, symmetrical taste of the late Georgian period, its cut-stone eaves and six-over-six sash windows typical of a moderately prosperous farmhouse or minor gentry residence of the era. Sixty years later, someone added the crenellated block to the rear, borrowing the battlements and corbelling of a castle to dress up what was, structurally, still a plain three-bay, three-storey house. This was a common enough gesture in the nineteenth century, when Gothic Revival fashion encouraged Irish landowners to reach for the vocabulary of medieval fortification even when building nothing more defensive than a parlour wing. The limestone courtyard attached to the house, coursed and squared rather than roughly rubble-built, suggests the estate had the means to finish its working yard to a standard usually reserved for the house itself.

Little survives of either roof now, though the hipped slate structure over the front block and the corbelled parapet of the rear block can still be traced in outline, along with the pair of chimneystacks marking the ridge of the older house. Modern farm buildings with corrugated-iron roofs have been built hard against the later block's main elevation, and a working farmyard extends to the east, so the ruin sits within an active agricultural setting rather than an isolated one. The stonework rewards a slow look: block-and-start surrounds on the end windows of the later block, tooled limestone sills throughout, and the odd detail of the second block's full-height pilasters framing its end walls, a refinement rarely lavished on what is, underneath the castellated dressing, a fairly modest farmhouse extension.