Harleypark House, Harley Park, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
House
At the back of a perfectly ordinary-looking Georgian country house in upland Tipperary, a single gable wall sits embedded in a later range of outbuildings, quietly out of proportion with everything around it.
It is 1.2 metres thick, roughly twice the thickness of any adjoining wall, and it protrudes eastward beyond the building line in a way that no purely decorative element would. This is almost certainly all that remains of a 17th-century house, absorbed and built around by subsequent generations until only this one end wall survived.
The house that frames it is an 18th-century two-storey, five-bay country house, the kind of modest but composed rural residence that once dotted the Irish midlands and south. But the older gable, which rises a full two storeys, gives away something of what came before. It was originally topped by four diamond-shaped Jacobean-style brick chimney stacks, a distinctive form of ornamental brickwork associated with early to mid-17th-century building fashions in Ireland and Britain. Two of those stacks were functional; the other two, one on each side, were purely decorative dummies, a detail confirmed by the house's owner. The stacks have since been rendered over and altered, softening the evidence but not entirely erasing it. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 records a castle on this site, though no physical trace of that structure remains visible above ground. The Down Survey maps, compiled around the same period as part of the same great Cromwellian mapping effort, show two houses here, and it is plausible that one corresponds to the surviving gable.
The setting is open and exposed, flat grassland in an upland area with clear views in most directions, which gives the complex an oddly legible quality from a distance. The layering of centuries is most apparent at the rear of the main house, where the older gable breaks the roofline of the eastern range.