For over a hundred years Country Life has been publishing definitive articles on the country houses of Great Britain and Ireland, illustrated with specially commissioned photography by some of the century' s pre-eminent architectural photographers. Taken predominantly on glass plate negatives, the beauty and comprehensiveness of these illustrations is without equal, making the Country Life photographic archive a truly amazing resource.

After the turn of the twentieth century, the growing interest in Georgian architecture led Country Life' s writers to explore the unique to the development of the eighteenth-century house contribution made by Irish architects and craftsmen. However, as the pace of loss and destruction of so many houses quickened in the middle of the century, the magazine' s photographs became an increasingly important, sometimes unique, record of what had gone.

Here Sea n O' Reilly, one of Ireland' s leading architectural historians, has selected two hundred of the archive' s most outstanding photographs and provided the essential historical background required for an appreciation of some of Ireland' s greatest buildings, making this book not only an important survey, but also a portfolio of classic photographs of unrivalled beauty and significance.