Oghil House, Oghil, Co. Sligo

It has lost pieces that once gave it polish, notably its entrance doorcase and its original window glazing, yet the proportions of the building, a compact three-bay by three-bay block of two storeys, still read clearly enough for a visitor to sense what it was meant to look like. Roughcast walls rise to a hipped roof of artificial slate, finished with squat corbelled chimneystacks and eaves that project slightly beyond the wall line, a small detail that would have thrown rain clear of the render below. The overall effect is of a house built to a settled, unshowy pattern of Irish gentry architecture rather than to any particular architectural fashion.

The house dates from around 1835, a period when many such rectangular, hip-roofed dwellings were going up across rural Ireland for middling landed families, built for comfort and order rather than display. Its footprint includes a service yard to the rear, on the south side, where the servants' quarters now stand derelict but still legible, retaining original sash windows, six panes over six, in contrast to the uPVC casements that have replaced the main house's windows in more recent decades. That contrast between the two ranges, one updated with modern materials and one left to decay quietly, gives the site an unusual layered quality: two structures from the same build, ageing along entirely different paths. Inside the main block, the original scheme survives rather better than the exterior suggests, with decorative plaster cornices and ceiling roses, timber panelled doors framed by entablatures in the principal rooms, and a curving staircase with moulded balusters and a hardwood handrail, all pointing to a house furnished with some care for its status.

The approach today is by a gravel driveway from the east, arriving at a house that looks south over its walled garden, an orientation that would have made the most of daylight and shelter for both the family rooms and whatever produce the garden once supplied. The elliptical-headed front door, though fitted with a replacement hardwood doorcase in the 1990s, still sits within its original painted render surround, moulded and chamfered, above a limestone step, a reminder that even altered doorways can preserve the shape of the opening they were built for.