That detail alone gives some sense of the ambitions of the house, a three-storey late eighteenth-century block in gently rolling Co. Mayo pasture, now standing roofless after a burning in 1922 from which it was never restored. It was damaged once before, during the 1798 Rebellion, when the original staircase was destroyed, and the building's subsequent history reads as a slow accumulation of loss.

The house was built around 1790 by James Cuff, who later became the first Baron Tirawley. Cuff was connected to the Gore family through his mother Elizabeth, the sister of Arthur Gore, 1st Earl of Arran, and the estate on which he built had its own layered past. The land had originally belonged to the Bourkes, passing to the Gores after the Williamite War of the 1690s, and the Gores in turn leased it to the Cuffs. About 250 metres to the south-west, the earlier Gore residence still stood, comprising a medieval tower house and a later fortified house, the kind of defensive architecture that had defined landownership in the region for centuries. Castle Gore was something different: a composed, classical statement, with a tripartite doorway flanked by engaged Tuscan columns, a pediment, and a hall decorated with delicate late-Georgian plasterwork. James Cuff died without a legitimate son, and the house passed to his illegitimate son, Colonel James Cuff. When the colonel died in 1828, ownership reverted to the Gore family, who had been there, in one form or another, all along.

What remains today is the roofless shell, sitting in pasture above the Deel River. The architectural record describes a drawing room with niches beside the fireplace, a narrow staircase hall lit by a tall round-headed window, a coach arcade with a stone arcade in the office court, and that underground service tunnel. Most of these interiors are now open to the sky, but the building's bones survive, and the proximity of the older tower house to the south-west means the site holds several centuries of occupation in a small compass.