Country house, Shanballymore, Co. Cork

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Country house, Shanballymore, Co. Cork

Tucked into the north Cork countryside near Shanballymore, this two-storey house carries a quiet architectural puzzle on its western end: a large stepped chimney stack that juts out from a later lean-to addition and appears, to those who look closely, to belong to something older than the house around it.

That kind of embedded evidence, a remnant of an earlier structure absorbed into successive phases of building, is easily missed on a house that otherwise presents a composed, respectable face to the world.

The entrance front faces south across five bays, its symmetry anchored by a central door with an elliptically headed opening, a form common in Irish domestic architecture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the semicircular fanlight gave way to the slightly flattened elliptical arch as a mark of modest refinement. The roofline is gable-ended, with attic windows and chimneys sitting on the gables, which gives the elevation a certain plainness that suits the rural setting. Around the back, the picture becomes more complicated. A central gabled projection has been enveloped by a lean-to addition running the full width of the rear, and it is from the western end of this addition that the stepped chimney stack protrudes, hinting at building activity that predates the tidy Georgian-ish front the house now presents to visitors.

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Pete F
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