Barracks, Clogher Demesne, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Military Buildings

Barracks, Clogher Demesne, Co. Cork

There is something quietly disorienting about pulling up to a public bar and noticing that the ground-floor windows are still protected by iron bars.

The building on the north bank of the Awbeg River in Clogher Demesne, Co. Cork, beside Ballynamona Bridge, is now part residential house and part licensed premises, but its original purpose is written into the fabric of the place for anyone who looks closely enough.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map names it plainly as a Police Station, placing it firmly in the era of the Irish Constabulary, the force established in the 1820s to provide a more centralised, quasi-military model of policing across rural Ireland. The building itself is a two-storey rectangular structure whose entrance front faces east in three bays, dominated by a large bow-fronted central projection, a feature more associated with the domestic architecture of the period than with anything martial. The bow carries a conical hip above a hipped roof with projecting eaves, and a central chimney stack rises above. Plaster hood mouldings frame every window opening, and the first floor of the bow projection is lit by a large mullioned and transomed window, the kind of timber gridwork that divides a window into multiple lights, lending the whole front an almost civic dignity. Tripartite windows flank the bow on the east elevation, while a single sash window faces north. The ground-floor windows, however, retain their iron bars, a detail that sits oddly against the otherwise considered, almost genteel composition of the facade.

The iron bars and the diamond-glazed windows of the bow projection are the clearest legible traces of what the building once was. The recent addition to the rear has not disturbed the essential character of the front elevation, which remains largely as it would have appeared to anyone approaching across Ballynamona Bridge in the nineteenth century, summoned or otherwise.

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