Tynte Lodge, Tullaghan, Co. Leitrim

The towers are castellated, meaning finished with battlements like a miniature castle, and one even carries gun loops, narrow openings for firing weapons, on its cliff-top position, though the defensive appearance is decorative rather than functional. It is an unusual combination: a genteel Georgian residence paired with mock-military architecture, all arranged within walled gardens and enclosures that step down toward the sea.

The house itself dates to around 1750, a detached five-bay, two-storey country residence with a distinctive D-plan porch and bowed end bays giving movement to an otherwise symmetrical façade. A six-bay extension was added to the rear, and at some point a return, a rear wing set at an angle to the main block, was demolished, leaving its walls to enclose a courtyard rather than a room. The roofs are pitched slate and tile, the chimneystacks rendered and topped with terracotta pots, and the walls finished in ruled-and-lined render, a technique of scoring wet render to mimic the joints of ashlar stonework. Alongside the main house stand the remains of a two-storey stone outbuilding, its openings finished with cut stone voussoirs, the wedge-shaped blocks that form a proper arch, and beyond that a run of single-storey byres, now derelict, to the south-west. The enclosure walls are built from sea-rolled boulders gathered from the shore and squared random stone blocks, a practical mixing of materials that speaks to what was available close at hand. The two folly towers stand apart from the house, one on the cliff-top to the north, roughly coursed and incorporating fossilised stone in its walls, the other freestanding to the south-west, both built purely for effect rather than defence, in the tradition of eighteenth and nineteenth-century landowners who liked their estates to look faintly embattled.

Much of the site is now in a state of decline; the outbuildings and byres are derelict, some window openings in the main house have been blocked up, and the original windows have been replaced with uPVC. Yet the overall arrangement, house, courtyard, walled gardens, and the two towers holding their positions at either end of the property, still reads clearly on the ground, and the setting above the ocean remains the defining feature of the place.