Kilnacrott House(The Cavan Centre), Kilnacrott, Co. Cavan

It is an unusually theatrical piece of architecture for the Cavan countryside, built to make an entrance feel like an event, with a sandstone crest set into the stonework bearing the arms of the family who once lived behind it. The whole effect is deliberate: this is Tudor Revival architecture at its most confident, a nineteenth-century style that borrowed the gables, mullioned windows and studded doors of sixteenth-century England to lend older-seeming gravitas to a newer house.

The house dates from around 1845 and was built for Pierce Morton, on land that had come into the family through Robert Morton during the Cromwellian confiscations of the seventeenth century, when large tracts of Irish land were redistributed to soldiers and settlers loyal to the new order. The result, some two centuries later, is a U-plan house of considerable scale, its advanced gabled end bays and slender castellated finials giving it a silhouette closer to a minor English manor than a typical Cavan gentry residence. Triple octagonal chimneystacks rise from ashlar limestone stacks, and the roofline is broken by first-floor windows pushing up through the eaves, an arrangement that adds to the restless, vertical energy of the design. From 1930 the building took on an entirely different life, when the Holy Trinity Priory established a school there, a use that has since evolved into its present function as an education centre while leaving the fabric of the house remarkably intact.

Inside, a heavily moulded cantilevered stair, Tudor arch openings and vaulted plasterwork survive from the original build, alongside stained glass windows flanking the main doorcase and lighting the stair window at the rear. The doorcase itself, with Doric pilasters framing studded timber doors under a Tudor arch panel, sets the tone for the rest of the interior. Beyond the house, a screen wall with its own Tudor-style gabled archway leads to a side yard, and a separate courtyard complex, entered through a double-height archway with voussoirs and a hexagonal finial, gathers the outbuildings into two distinct yards. These service buildings, with their gabled breakfronts, half-dormer windows and mix of red brick and limestone surrounds, were clearly built with as much care as the house itself, forming a complex that reads less as an afterthought than as a considered architectural statement in its own right.