Fortland House, Lissinagroagh, Co. Leitrim

Three bays wide, two storeys over a raised basement, the façade is arranged with the kind of deliberate balance that eighteenth-century builders favoured for houses meant to impress from a distance as much as up close. What catches the eye now, though, is a small act of loss: the door. Somewhere around 1996 the original timber panelled door, its fanlight and sidelights were taken out and replaced with uPVC, a change that quietly undercuts the formality the rest of the building still projects.

The house dates to around 1740, and for part of its nineteenth-century life it belonged to a G. Gledstanes, whose name is the only personal thread tying the building to a particular owner. Architecturally it holds to the conventions of its period and scale: a hipped slate roof, rendered chimneystacks, cast-iron rainwater goods, and rendered walls dressed up with stucco quoins, the pilaster-like blocks at the corners that give an otherwise plain wall a sense of structure. The timber sash windows sit on tooled limestone sills, and the segmental-headed doorway, its arch a shallow curved segment rather than a full semicircle, would once have been softened by the fanlight and sidelights that no longer survive. A return to the rear extends the plan, and the whole composition reads as a confident, if not especially large, statement of mid-Georgian domestic architecture.

It is the rear yard, rather than the house itself, that offers the most unexpected detail. The outbuildings there are modest in themselves, but one has steps built through it, an odd bit of internal circulation that turns a working structure into something more curious than its function alone would suggest. Little else marks it out; no elaborate ornament, no unusual materials, just a plain outbuilding with a stairway threaded through its body, tucked behind a house whose grandest gesture remains its unbroken, symmetrical front.