Courtyard, Mountfalcon, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Utility Structures

Courtyard, Mountfalcon, Co. Tipperary

Tucked behind one of County Tipperary's early Georgian houses is a courtyard enclosed by a high stone wall, its most quietly arresting feature not the house itself but an outbuilding on the southern side, which retains a large fireplace complete with a brick oven.

It is the kind of detail that fixes a domestic world in place, a reminder that the service buildings behind a country house were once as purposeful and as busy as anything in the main block.

The house at Mountfalcon dates to 1720, its origins recorded literally in stone. The attic storey carries an inscription reading 'RMF', standing for Richard and Maria Faulkner, the couple who built it. The façade is a composed piece of early eighteenth-century architecture: five bays wide and two storeys over a basement, with the main entrance set centrally on the western face behind a Gibbsian surround, a type of doorcase framing in which the architrave is interrupted by blocked keystones, named after the Scottish architect James Gibbs. Scrolls support a pediment above it, and the attic storey is itself pedimented, with a round-headed window at its centre flanked by paterae, flat circular ornaments used as decorative punctuation, and a blind balustrade. A cornice with balls at the ends and on the pediment, and volutes emphasising the pediment at either side, complete the effect. The architectural historian Maurice Craig, writing in 1972, noted that nineteenth-century intervention had done some damage: the house was rendered and stucco cornices were added to the windows, along with a pediment over the central first-floor window, changes that overlay the original character rather than complement it. At the rear, two moulded string-courses survive in the east wall of a projecting T-shaped wing, one forming the lintel of a first-floor window, the other roughly a metre above it, quiet evidence of the original building's ambitions before later alterations reworked much of the rear elevation.

The courtyard itself, well-built and enclosed, sits behind the main block. It is the brick oven in the southern outbuilding that rewards a closer look, a domestic survival of the kind that rarely makes it into formal descriptions of Georgian country houses, where attention tends to fall on façades and pediments rather than on the spaces where food was prepared and the household was actually kept running.

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