Killegar House, Killegar, Co. Leitrim

The house was built with its principal elevation facing south-east, framed by a pedimented breakfront and dressed with the kind of Tuscan doorcase and symmetrical window arrangement that any student of Classical architecture would recognise at a glance. Yet the entrance now used lies through the garden, on the opposite side, where a round-headed doorway flanked by engaged Tuscan columns admits visitors past a house that has quietly turned its back on its own design.

The house dates to 1813, a detached eight-bay, two-storey block with a basement tucked beneath the rear elevation and a pitched slate roof finished with terracotta ridge tiles and ashlar chimneystacks. Its breakfront, the projecting central section that catches the pediment above, is flanked by end bays with round-headed windows set into blind arches, a decorative device that gives depth to a flat rendered wall without actually opening it up. The original north-east entrance, now derelict, kept its own brick and cut stone porch with a panelled double door and side lights, a formal counterpart to the garden front that has since taken over as the working entrance. Change came in stages: around 1940 the plan was altered with the loss of two rooms, and in 1970 a fire tore through the principal rooms, leaving the interior much reduced even as the exterior retains its early nineteenth-century bones. Nearby, a pedimented outbuilding faces onto a cobbled yard, reached through limestone ashlar gate piers, ruinous now but still legible as part of the same architectural scheme that shaped the house.

The building sits at the end of a driveway that runs through lakeland, a setting that would have been designed as much for effect as for access, with the house only revealing itself after a considerable approach. That reversal of front and back, the grand Classical face now secondary to a garden doorway, is perhaps the detail worth carrying away, a small architectural puzzle set within a demesne landscape that has otherwise weathered its two centuries with more grace than the house itself.