Barn, Egmont, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Farm Buildings

Barn, Egmont, Co. Cork

On an elevated rocky outcrop in North Cork, a two-storey ruin sits in open pasture with views stretching in every direction.

What makes it odd is not just its scale but its architecture: a large L-shaped structure of rubble masonry, roofed by high pointed vaults constructed using plank centring, a technique in which timber boards form a temporary mould over which the vault is built before being removed once the masonry sets. Pointed vaults of this kind are more commonly associated with medieval religious or defensive buildings than with agricultural use, and the combination of that roofing form with wide cart-width doorways, a first-floor level, and a pair of underground vaulted cellars immediately to the north makes this a structurally unusual building by any measure.

Local tradition, recorded by the antiquarian James Grove White in the early twentieth century, holds that the structure was a barn and cider press built in the seventeenth century by a colonel Taylor. If that attribution is correct, it would place the building within the broader context of settler estate agriculture in Munster during that period, when apple orchards and cider production were actively encouraged on planted lands. The main block measures roughly fifteen and a half metres north to south and five and a half metres east to west, with wide central doorways in the east and west walls whose arches have since collapsed; the springing points of those arches survive at around two metres above the present ground level. A photograph taken in 1909 shows the north end of the building still intact at that time, with a ground-floor doorway and first-floor window that mirrored those in the south wall. That end has since fallen to foundation level. The twin underground cellars to the north, each measuring roughly four and a half by seven metres, have brick vaults that are now almost entirely collapsed, and the original length of the cellars is uncertain because the eastern end is missing.

The segmental brick arches used in the window openings and door surrounds, a form in which the arch describes only a shallow curve rather than a full semicircle, point to building practices that became common in Ireland from the late seventeenth century onward, consistent with the Taylor tradition. The drain-like rectangular opening near ground level in the south wall, the masonry abutments framing the west doorway, and the partially blocked annexe doorway all hint at a building that was modified and put to practical use over a long period, whatever its original purpose.

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