These busy years faded with the austerity of war, and the property gradually declined and was sold to the State, which failed to care adequately for the house. Another common sight would be dwellings with religious symbols and pictures on the walls, bibles, and bottles of holy water on mantelpieces. I travelled to an iron ore mine deep in the Sahara Desert on one of the world's most extreme railways. During this time I uncovered that the house had begun as a country mansion and was used as a summer residence and had belonged to Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon from Belfast.

Bawnboy Workhouse was completed in 1851-2 and was designed by the George Wilkinson, who was the Poor Law Commissioners’ architect. Initially a nice thing to look at but on any reasonable reflection its pretty clear its an 'easy' book.

Images of abandonment, from decaying big houses to humble cottages, eerily empty convents, schools and asylums left to crumble, are endlessly fascinating to photographers and viewers. When I got home and started editing, I noticed something in the glass door that I hadn’t noticed at the time. Entertainment Co Down photographer Rebecca Brownlie on peeling back 'hidden layers' in Abandoned Ireland New book Abandoned Ireland is packed with beautiful, evocative pictures of neglected buildings which now serve as crumbling time capsules of days past. More than being spooked by the supernatural, it’s the fact that so many wonderful structures are lost through mismanagement, inertia caused by building restrictions or destroyed by vandalism that Brownlie finds truly terrifying.

They were well known for being great entertainers and it was said that they held the most lavish parties – Princess Margaret is recorded to have had lunch here during one of her tours. Abandoned Ireland travels the length and breadth of the island of Ireland visiting and documenting our forgotten buildings, highlighting their social importance, and bringing their stories back to life through the medium of photography. I, which now has almost 50,000 followers – a clear indicator of how these images exert such a hold on the collective imagination. On the other hand, you can find a grand mansion, and imagine that it’s full of crumbling antique furniture and the walls decorated with peeling artwork… only to find an empty shell on the inside.

Rebecca Brownlie provides a rapid sketch of the house’s 20th-century history: its beginnings as a property built, rebuilt and rebuilt again by a fussy Scottish industrialist; its final iteration as a complicated Edwardian mansion; and its salad days as a focus of what passed for high society in a narrow, unionist-controlled Northern Ireland (Princess Margaret, who seems to feature in every story of the 20th century, inevitably pops up here too). It started off as a summer residence and the Dixons were well known for throwing lavish parties in the house. Abandoned Ireland is packed with beautiful, evocative pictures of neglected buildings which now serve as crumbling time capsules of days past. She has documented rich archive imagery through her photography book, through how emotionally the photographs feel, the editing, and the sequencing.

We all pass by properties everyday that eventually we overlook but have wondered about, this book tells some of those buildings stories. Below you'll find 16 abandoned sites on the island of Ireland that appear in the tome, with caption information courtesy of the author. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). Inmates were free to leave when they liked, but most of those who entered weren’t in the position to do so.I’ve learnt many things on this photographic journey, and one is to never judge a house from its exterior. Our small-group adventures are inspired by our Atlas of the world's most fascinating places, the stories behind them, and the people who bring them to life.