Country house, Kilmurry, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Main Houses
A line of stone urns sits along the parapet of a country house in Kilmurry, Co. Cork, decorating the roofline of a building that, by the late 1970s at least, had no one left inside to appreciate them.
The house was recorded as unoccupied as far back as 1978, lending it the particular atmosphere of a place designed with considerable care and then quietly abandoned to its own geometry.
The building dates in appearance to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, a period when the Protestant Ascendancy gentry were constructing or remodelling houses across Munster in the Neo-classical manner fashionable at the time. This one follows the pattern closely. The southern entrance front presents five bays across two storeys, with single-bay wings at each end framed by strip pilasters, the shallow vertical bands of masonry used to suggest order and proportion without the expense of full columns. The central doorway sits behind a portico carried on rusticated piers, stone dressed with a roughened or blocked surface to give a sense of solidity and weight. Above it, on the first floor, a Venetian window, the tripartite design with a taller arched central light flanked by two narrower rectangular ones, marks the principal room behind. The hipped roof, sloping on all four sides, is hidden entirely behind the parapet, giving the house a flat, composed skyline broken only by those urns.
