Kilmacurragh, Westaston Demesne, Co. Wicklow

The contrast is the point. Walk through woodland gardens maintained with evident care, and arrive at a shell of render and slate, windows open to the sky, the breakfront's pediment long gone. Few ruins keep such well-tended company.

The house itself dates to around 1697, a detached two-storey block of five bays with a projecting three-bay breakfront that would once have been topped by a pediment, a triangular gable feature borrowed from classical architecture, since lost. In 1843 two single-storey wings were added, presumably to modernise or extend the living quarters of a house already a century and a half old. The hipped roof, its remains still visible, was finished in natural slate, and to the rear stands a large range of outbuildings, the working buildings of a country estate; stables, stores, and service ranges, some of which have since been converted into dwellings and visitor facilities. The house's fortunes changed decisively in 1976, when fire gutted the building and left it in the ruinous state that survives today. The demesne around it, well wooded and long cultivated, escaped that fate and developed instead into the gardens and arboretum for which the place is now chiefly known.

The house is in the care of the Office of Public Works, and the gardens are open to the public as an arboretum, meaning the ruin can be viewed as part of a wider walk through planted woodland rather than as an isolated monument. It is a rare case of a genuinely historic building being preserved as a ruin rather than restored, its outline and materials, render, slate, the ghost of a pediment, left legible against the trees that have since grown up around and past it.