Fort William, Camlin, Co. Donegal

A modestly scaled Victorian or Edwardian facade, all render decoration and asymmetrical bay windows, presents itself to the road as the sort of house a parish priest might have lived in. Step around the back, though, and the building changes character entirely: a much taller, plainer block of red brick, three storeys over a basement, rises where the ground slopes away to the south. Red brick is an unusual choice for a house of this type, date and location in this part of the country, and its presence here is one of the clues that the building was assembled in at least two distinct campaigns, a century or more apart.

That earlier brick house dates from around 1790, or possibly a little before, and was built by a branch of the Tredennick family, who also held Camlin Castle a short distance to the north-east from about 1718 (largely rebuilt in 1838 and now mostly demolished). The Tredennicks appear to have had a house called Fortwilliam in the Ballyshannon area as early as the 1750s, when a Galbraith Tredennick of that name is recorded there; a Galbraith Tredennick, perhaps his son, later served as a Lieutenant in the Bombay Artillery against Tipu Sultan in 1782. Successive directories trace the family's occupation of the house through the nineteenth century: John Tredennick in 1824, a W. Tredennick in 1837, William Tredennick in 1846, Charles John Tredennick in 1881, and Captain William Tredennick in 1894. By 1876 William Tredennick of Fortwilliam held over four and a half thousand acres in Roscommon along with substantial land in Donegal and Tyrone, a reminder of how landed estates of this period rarely rested on a single county's ground. The family retained the property until at least 1925, the year Charles John's death is recorded.

The later front block, raised in the late Victorian or Edwardian period, was designed with a deliberate lack of symmetry that was fashionable at the time: a full-height gable-fronted box-bay window at one end answered by a canted bay at the other, a mismatch of window shapes across the facade, and a shallow central porch reached by a flight of cut stone steps. Much of the original fabric survives, including timber sliding sash windows, a panelled front door with bolection-moulded panels, and the natural slate roof, while the render itself carries architraved surrounds and moulded cornices over the ground-floor openings. The earlier rear block has fared less well in its details, having lost most of its original window fittings, and render has fallen away in places along the return to reveal the Flemish-bond brickwork beneath. The house still sits within its landscaped grounds east of Ballyshannon and west of Belleek, approached through a gateway with cut stone piers to the north-east, with a walled garden surviving in outline to the east and a cluster of outbuildings to the west.