‘The lodge was built all over and each side of the gate, in two two-storey octagonal turrets joined by a Gothic arch. Four octagonal rooms in the turrets and an up and down room in the arch housed the Conarchy family, who were all, however, quite ordinary shapes.’
The above passage describes the gatelodge entrance to the fictional Kilskour Castle in Sheila Pim’s A Brush with Death, published in 1950. An ardent gardener who wrote extensively on the subject, Pim (1909-1995) also produced four detective novels (often with a strong horticultural theme) from the mid-1940s onwards, although A Brush with Death is more concerned with art and provides an amusing portrait of Dublin’s cultural world in the middle of the last century.
As for the lodge shown here, it was the original entrance to Heywood, County Laois and is thought to have been designed around 1810 by the estate’s then-owner Michael Frederick Trench, who was also responsible for erecting a number of Gothic follies in the grounds (for more on these, see https://theirishaesthete.com/2018/08/27/heywood/)