Country house, Teeveeny, Co. Cork
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Main Houses
On the gable wall of a farmyard complex in Teeveeny, North Cork, a carved stone head wearing a turban looks out above a small circular oculus window.
It is the kind of detail that raises more questions than it answers, sitting quietly amid the rendered rubble walls and iron-barred sash windows of what is otherwise a fairly conventional early nineteenth-century country house and its associated outbuildings.
The house itself is a two-storey rectangular structure, four bays wide on its entrance front, with plate glass sash windows and an off-centre door. A later addition to one side, three bays wide, has iron-barred windows and is no longer occupied; a short castellated wall, a decorative parapet with battlemented topping, extends from the southeast gable, hinting at a degree of architectural self-consciousness on the part of whoever built or extended the place. The farmyard to the rear is where the complex becomes genuinely interesting. A long two-storey outhouse forms one side of the yard, and an L-shaped range of single-storey farm buildings completes the enclosure, with neatly plastered surrounds on their window and door openings. A segmental archway, a rounded arch with a shallow curve, carries a keystone dated 1874, anchoring at least part of the complex to the Victorian period. Most unexpectedly, the wall in the western corner, connecting two of the farm ranges, is topped by an ashlar bellcote, a small stone structure designed to hold a bell, of the kind more usually associated with a chapel or estate church than a working farmyard. The pointed niches in the same wall add to the vaguely ecclesiastical atmosphere. According to the owner, a ruined farm building to the southeast of the complex was once used as a school, suggesting the estate at some point served functions well beyond ordinary agriculture.