1840 – Cecil Manor, Augher, Co. Tyrone

Cecil Manor was described as ‘rather forbidding and architecturally uninteresting’ with wide set windows in large solid expanses of wall underneath an overhanging roof with a bracket cornice. There was an unimposing gateway beyond which a broad coach road wound for some distance through the grounds to end with a final sweep before the front entrance. After the death in London of the owner Francis P. Gervais in 1918, it was left empty and for a time was considered for the purpose of a secondary school. Described in 1925 as “It is a four-storeyed building with a superior cut-stone finish. The first and second flats are large and well-ventilated, with folding doors which can be so arranged that they will hold any size of meeting. At the rear is a fine tennis court.” The school never materialised and by the 1930s the house, had an “air of desolation”. It was sold and later demolished by the new owners.