Houses with names like this, optimistic and seasonal, were typically built by or for the Anglo-Irish gentry during the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, often as secondary residences or improved farmhouses, sometimes as the principal seat of a minor landowning family. The name alone suggests aspiration, a desire to impose a certain gentility on the land. What makes such places quietly compelling is precisely what tends to erase them: the upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, changes in land ownership, abandonment, and the slow work of the elements on unoccupied masonry.