House - vernacular house, Curraghgorm, Co. Cork

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House

House – vernacular house, Curraghgorm, Co. Cork

What catches the eye about this one-storey thatched house in Curraghgorm, in the north of County Cork, is less its age than its quiet coherence.

The building turns its back on the road quite deliberately: the rear elevation, which runs along the road, has no openings at all, no windows, no door, nothing. All the life of the house faces south, away from passing traffic and, presumably, away from the prevailing weather.

The south-facing front presents four bays, with the door placed slightly off-centre to the east and framed by projecting surrounds, a small decorative or practical emphasis that gives the entrance a degree of formality unusual in a building of this type. The chimney, too, sits off-centre to the east, suggesting the internal layout follows its own logic rather than any strict symmetry. The roof is hipped and thatched, a form once extremely common across rural Ireland but now increasingly rare; a hipped roof has no gable ends, the thatch instead sweeping down on all four sides, which tends to make the structure more resistant to wind. A garage was added to the west at some point, and a second vernacular house of similar character stands immediately to the north, suggesting this was never an isolated dwelling but part of a small, settled cluster along this road.

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Pete F
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