Killasona House, Killasona, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Main Houses
A five-bay house does not usually present itself as three, but a closer look at Killasona House explains the trick: the upper floor still shows the original five openings, while the ground and first floors were widened in the early nineteenth century into broad Wyatt windows, named for the architect brothers who popularised them, with a taller central light flanked by narrower sidelights.
The effect telescopes the building's history into a single facade, an eighteenth-century house wearing a Regency update, and it is this layering, rather than any single grand gesture, that makes the place worth pausing over. Disused now, it has kept its natural slate roof, its timber sliding sash windows, and a doorcase of carved limestone with fluted keystone and moulded pilasters that still commands the north front even without the fanlight it once had above the door.
The house is generally dated to around 1770, with the window alterations following around 1810, but the Nugent family's association with Killasona reaches back further still. A will made by a John Nugent of Killasona House survives from 1707 or 1708, implying an earlier structure on the site of which the present building may retain some fabric. Later residents included a Sir Ignatius Nugent around 1720 and a Count Christopher Nugent, recorded in Slater's Directory of 1846, suggesting the family held the property into the nineteenth century's middle decades. Ownership seems to have passed out of Nugent hands sometime after that, and by 1906 the estate was in the possession of a Richard Davoren, who agreed to sell the lands at Killasonna to his own tenants, a small but telling episode in the broader story of Irish landholding in the years before independence. The house stands with a complex of outbuildings and a walled garden to its south, the three together forming a group that reads as a single working estate rather than isolated fragments.
Set back from the road south of Abbeylara in County Longford, the house sits within grounds still bounded by a rendered garden wall and gate piers, with a wrought-iron gate at the west gable giving onto the yard of outbuildings behind. The Palladian hint in that central doorcase, paired with the round-headed window above it, a device more associated with grander eighteenth-century design than with a modest country house, rewards anyone who stops to read the facade rather than simply pass it.
Nearby Places
Visitor Notes
Added by
