Country house, Inchigaggin, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Main Houses
Something is slightly off about the front of this country house south of the River Lee, and that small asymmetry is quietly telling.
The entrance doorway, round-headed with a fanlight above it, sits not at the centre of the nine-bay facade but a little to one side. One chimney stack also sits off-centre in the gabled roof. These are the kinds of irregularities that suggest a building with a complicated history, one that was added to and adjusted over time rather than conceived whole.
The house is a two-storey rectangular structure, two bays deep, with sash windows running across the east-facing entrance front. A two-storey single-bay extension projects to the west. Inside, a fireplace dateable to the mid-eighteenth century survives, though the owner has suggested the house itself may be older than that. The strongest evidence for an earlier core lies in the northern five bays of the facade: this section has a chimney stack at each end and a door placed centrally between them, a configuration that reads almost as a self-contained house in its own right. Some windows to the south have been blocked, another sign that the building was modified as it grew. The picture that emerges is of an early structure, possibly from the first decades of the eighteenth century or even before, that was later extended and regularised without being entirely remodelled, leaving its earlier logic just visible beneath the surface.