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You don't have to go far in Ireland to discover links with Australia. Jjust outside Galway, there's a big one. St Clerans was the family home of Robert O'Hara Burke, who led the famously doomed expedition with his colleague William Wills to try and cross Australia from south to north, dying outside Coopers Creek in 1861. The landscape of the outback couldn't be further from the misty green lushness that surrounds St Clerans. Its architect was Richard Morrison, a man whose reverence for Classicism is clear from the way he named his son Vitruvius, after the Roman architect whose writings sparked the Classical revival in the Renaissance. The elegant and simple house was completed in 1811 using local stone. But it has oddities, like curved ends which give it an almost Art Deco feel, and a pronounced arch built into the façade to accentuate the entrance portico. It's these flashes of individual style that mark out Irish country houses from their English variants of the same period, as though they just couldn't help adding a little feature here and there. Morrison would go on to design Galway's solidly Classical courthouse and its austere gaol buildings, the gaol being demolished a century later to make way for the new cathedral.