Kilgory House, Kilgory, Co. Clare

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House

Kilgory House, Kilgory, Co. Clare

On the northern shore of Kilgory Lough in County Clare, a late seventeenth-century house survives to eaves level in dense overgrowth, its roofless walls partly obscured by ivy and the encroachment of a later two-storey dwelling built directly onto its footprint.

The south-facing front of the original structure is gone, replaced around 1928 when most of the house was demolished, with the newer building raised in part from salvaged materials. What remains is essentially the rear northern range: rubble limestone walls with finely dressed quoins at the north-east corner, flat relieving arches of cut stone, and fragments of render in both scratch and finishing coats still clinging to the interior surfaces. The ruin is divided by a cross-wall into two rooms, a kitchen to the east and a probable living room to the west, connected by splayed doorways at ground and first-floor level. The kitchen alone retains three broken-out brick fireplaces in its north wall, one of which includes a bread-oven, along with pairs of round-headed brick wall-niches set opposite each other in the east and west walls, almost certainly used for storage. A single-storey gabled addition at the rear carries its own cut limestone eaves course and shows evidence of at least two phases of modification, including an inserted fireplace and successive sets of joist hangers.

The house was originally a two-storey, gable-ended dwelling with marble chimneypieces, and it sat at the western end of a formal tree-lined avenue, known as an allée, that extended roughly 570 metres to a road to the west; parts of that planting survive today. It was the seat of the O'Callaghan family in the earlier eighteenth century, passing to the O'Connell family in the later eighteenth century, who retained it through the nineteenth century. Among those who reputedly stayed here was Daniel O'Connell, the political leader known as The Liberator, during his Clare election campaign of 1828, the contest that led directly to Catholic Emancipation the following year. Ordnance Survey mapping from 1840 onwards records the structure as an L-shaped building under its current name, giving a reasonably clear picture of its form before the partial demolition of 1928 altered it so substantially.

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