Prospect House, Cloverhill, Co. Cavan

This is a house built to look out from, sited to command the road that runs between Butlersbridge and Cloverhill through a stretch of countryside still marked by the large houses and demesnes that once organised it. What survives now is a shell of that former standing: a three-bay, two-storey country house over a basement, its render peeling from rubble stone walls, its windows reduced to the remains of two-over-two timber sashes, yet still legible as a building of some consequence.

It was built around 1770, in the plain, confident style of the smaller Irish country house of that period, with a hipped slate roof, clay ridge tiles and a corbel course, a row of small projecting stone supports, running along the eaves. A porch was added around 1820, its flat roof and convex stone cornice giving the entrance a slightly later, more decorative note than the house behind it. Stone architraves frame both the outer and inner porch doorways, and a stone string course, a raised horizontal band, runs above the plinth, with brick dressings picking out the window and door openings against the rendered stone. To the north, an abutting wall carries a brick and stone arch with the remains of cast-iron gates, hinting at a former entrance or yard that no longer connects to anything, since the outbuildings themselves are gone. Locally, the house is said to have had a later life as an Orange Hall, meeting place of the Orange Order, before falling out of use altogether; nothing in its fabric was built for that purpose, and the association belongs to the building's second life rather than its first.

The site itself does some of the explaining. The ground falls away sharply to the east, and where a visitor would expect only a basement half sunk into the earth, the full elevation of it is exposed, the house effectively standing a storey taller on that side than it appears from the road. It is this drop in level, combined with the elevated position implied in the name, that gives Prospect House its outlook, and its logic; a house placed not just for shelter but to be seen from, and to see from in turn, over ground that continues to fall away below it.