Syngefield, Birr, Co. Offaly

Venetian windows, those triple openings with an arched centre light flanked by narrower flat-headed ones, survive at the centre of the façade and again at the western end, while a Diocletian window, a semicircular form divided by two vertical bars named after the thermal baths of the Roman emperor Diocletian, has been bricked up at basement level. Even roofless ambition tends to leave its shape behind, and here the shape is unmistakably that of a house built to impress.

Syngefield dates to around 1760, a U-plan country house of two storeys raised over a basement, with a later single-bay addition to the west and a three-storey return running back from the main block. Rendered walls now roughcast rather than smooth, timber sash windows with tooled stone sills, and a round-headed entrance door with sidelights and a fanlight-like arrangement all point to a building designed with some care for classical proportion rather than plain utility. A wrought-iron balcony was inserted at first-floor level at some point in its history, and stone steps flanked by a rendered balustrade once led visitors up to the door. The rear wings have since been demolished, along with a stone outbuilding, leaving only a random coursed stone wall to mark where the working part of the estate stood. The gate piers at the entrance are older still, erected around 1710, decades before the house itself; tall ashlar limestone piers with moulded capping and ball finials, flanking wrought-iron gates and a pair of pedestrian entrances that have since been blocked up.

Approaching from the road south-east of Birr, it is the piers that announce Syngefield long before the house comes into view, dark limestone rising above the hedgerow at the head of a long avenue. The house itself is derelict and not in use, its Diocletian and round-headed basement windows sealed, its slate roof still largely intact with terracotta ridge tiles surviving on the hipped western end. It remains one of those buildings that reads more clearly as an idea, a statement of eighteenth-century taste transplanted to the Offaly countryside, than as a place anyone currently calls home.