Country house, Tullagreen, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Main Houses
Two millstones sitting somewhere in the farmyard at Tullagreen are about all that remains of what was once a substantial country house complex in east Cork, and even the house itself is gone.
What was recorded before its demolition was a late eighteenth or early nineteenth century structure, two storeys, L-shaped in plan, with a hipped roof, brick-arched windows, and a brick cornice along the entrance front. Five bays wide on its eastern face, with a central door and a two-storey hipped projection to the rear, it was the kind of modestly accomplished rural house that appeared across Munster during the period when improving landlords and prosperous farmers were building with a new confidence in Georgian proportion.
The complex it belonged to was considerably larger. Farm buildings to the south-southeast were part of the same ensemble and included a mill, the type of working structure that would have processed grain from the surrounding land. That broader complex did not survive a gas pipeline construction project in 1976, when much of it was cleared. The mill building went with the rest, though the two millstones, the heaviest and most inert components of any such operation, were left behind. A millstone, typically a thick disc of dressed stone used to grind grain between two rotating faces, is not easily shifted, and these two have outlasted everything built around them. The house, recorded but ultimately not protected, was demolished at some point after the survey that documented it.
