For over one 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 preeminent architectural photographers, a practice which endowed the magazine with a unique photographic archive. Taken predominantly on glass plate negatives, the beauty and comprehensiveness of these illustrations is without equal.After the turn of the century, the growing interest in Georgian architecture led Country Life's writers to explore the unique contribution made by Irish architects and craftsmen to the development of the eighteenth-century house. 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, and often unique, record of what had gone.Here Sean 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.