Temple House, Templehouse Demesne, Co. Sligo

Three buildings, three eras, occupying more or less the same patch of ground by a lake in County Sligo, each one apparently left to make way for the next rather than being cleared away entirely.

The mansion itself is the most complete chapter of that sequence. Built around 1820 and substantially extended and embellished in 1864, it presents a seven-bay, two-storey front to the north, its centre marked by a pedimented breakfront and a flat-roofed porte-cochere, the covered porch that allowed carriages to draw up under shelter, carried on paired Doric columns. An east wing, set slightly back and slightly lower, has its own porch on Ionic columns, while the south front takes a different tone altogether: three storeys of smooth-rendered walling with limestone quoins, plainer and more restrained than the north face's coursed ashlar, balustraded parapet and alternating pediments over the windows. The masonry throughout, particularly on the north and east elevations, is of a quality fine enough to have been singled out as artistically significant in its own right. The house has belonged to the Perceval family since 1665, a continuity of ownership that spans the very ruins standing in its grounds. To the south are the remains of a two-bay, two-storey stone house built around 1650, presumably an earlier Perceval dwelling, now reduced to rubble walling with a single gable still upright and its roof long gone. That house in turn is attached to the ruins of a medieval castle, older still, its original square-headed mullioned windows at some point blocked up and replaced with pointed-arch openings, a small but telling record of the building being altered to suit changing tastes or needs before it too was abandoned.

Approach is by a long tree-lined avenue running in from the north, opening onto a gravelled forecourt in front of the porte-cochere, with gardens and a lake set to the south-west. The earlier ruins stand in a field near that lake, to the north-west of the present house, close enough to be taken in on the same visit but distinct enough, in their bare stone and empty window openings, to read as a separate structure rather than an extension of the mansion behind them.