1848 – Parkanaur House, Castlecaulfield, Co. Tyrone

A Class A listed large Tudor Revival architecture house constructed in the 1840s. It has a terraced front with octagonal pinnacles and gables at each projection of the façade, a big bay window and an upper oriel and incorporates an earlier two storey building as an east wing. At the rear is a coach house. John Ynyr Burges, commissioned architect Thomas Duff to design the house, which was built between 1839 and 1854, but largely complete by 1848 at Duff’s death.

Parkanaur remained in the Burges family until they moved to England in 1955. It was then bought by an American millionaire Thomas Doran, who had emigrated from Castlecaulfield as a teenager. He made Parkanaur available to his friend Rev. Gerry Eakins to develop a new centre for the education of disabled young adults. The house reopened in 1960 as ‘The Thomas Doran Training Centre’, (Parkanaur College) and much of the house continues today in this role.