Country house, Labbacallee, Co. Cork

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Country house, Labbacallee, Co. Cork

Standing in pasture above the Funshion River in north Cork, a pair of limestone gables rise from the grass with no walls between them to speak of, the skeleton of a house that, according to local tradition, was never actually completed.

What survives of this late seventeenth or early eighteenth-century structure is precisely that: two gables, short stubs of the side walls, and the ghost of what was probably a five-bay front elevation facing east. The stonework is random-rubble limestone with traces of render still clinging to it, and the lines of joist holes running along the front and back walls mark exactly where the floors once sat, or were intended to sit.

The building measured roughly fourteen and a half metres north to south and just over six and a half metres east to west, a fairly substantial rectangular plan for its period. Each gable carried fireplaces on both the ground and first floors, the northern one with an externally projecting chimney stack nearly three metres wide at its base, tapering as it rises before narrowing to a slim shaft three-quarters of a metre square. The southern gable has a shallower, internally projecting stack. Across the river to the north stands Manning House, apparently built in a similar style, which gives some sense of the architectural world this building belonged to. A mill once operated nearby on the same side of the river. The place was known locally as the Manor House, and the antiquary Grove White, writing between 1905 and 1925, recorded a story he had heard in the area: that the house was left unfinished after a local farmer who had been removing stones from the site fell ill. Whether that explanation accounts for the building's incomplete state or merely reflects a later attempt to make sense of ruins, it attached itself firmly enough to the place to survive into the twentieth century.

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Pete F
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