Waterston (or Waterstown) House, Athlone, Co Westmeath

Mark Bence-Jones. A Guide to Irish Country Houses (originally published as Burke’s Guide to Country Houses volume 1 Ireland by Burke’s Peerage Ltd. 1978); Revised edition 1988 Constable and Company Ltd, London.

p. 282. “(Harris-Temple, sub Harris, B/PB) p. 282. “(Harris-Temple, sub Harris, B/PB) A very handsome three storey seven bay house by Richard Castle, with a solid roof parapet, rusticated window surrounds on the ground floor and a pedimented and rusticated doorway. Built ca 1749 for Gustavus Handcock, MP, ancestor of the Temple family who subsequently owned it; and whose heiress was the second wife of 2^nd Lord Harris. Brick gateway, hermitage, dovecot. The house is now in ruins.” 

Paddy Rossmore. Photographs. Edited by Robert O’Byrne. The Lilliput Press, Dublin 7, 2019.

“Only five bays of the original seven-bay garden front survive to indicate the scale of Waterstown, built around 1745 to the designs of Richard Castle. The land on which it stands was originally owned by a branch of the Dillon family and supposedly they erected a castle here although no evidence of it survives. The estate was acquired in the middle of the seventeenth century by William Handcock, originally from Lancashire. It was his grandson Gustavus Handcock who, following marriage to Elizabeth, only daughter and heiress of Robert Temple of Mount Temple in the same county, embarked on building a new residence here. Of three storeys over basement and faced with cut limestone, Waterstown seems to have mostly impressed thanks to its scale. The architectural features were undistinguished and the surviving interior wall shows the remains of the period’s standard plaster panelling. Passing through the female linke on one occasion in the nineteenth cnetury, Waterstown remained in the possession of Gustavus and Elizabeth Handcock’s descendants until 1923 when the place was sold to the Land Commission. Thereafter the condition of the ouse quickly deteriorated, and in 1928 a new owner stripped it of anythign valuable: the main Gibbsian doorcase went to another house while the principal estate gates can now be seen outside St Mel’s cathedral, Longford. A number of outbuildings and follies survive in the former demesne.”

Listed in Vanishing Country Houses of Ireland by The Knight of Glin, David J. Griffin and Nicholas K. Robinson, published by The Irish Architectural Archive and The Irish Georgian Society, 1988.