Country house, Aghavrin, Co. Cork

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Country house, Aghavrin, Co. Cork

At Aghavrin in County Cork, a two-storey house over a basement sits in a quiet arrangement of farm and garden that has changed little in outline since the early nineteenth century.

What draws the eye is the careful formality of the southern entrance front: five bays wide, a central door with a semicircular fanlight above it, and a flight of stone steps leading up to the threshold. The tall sash windows, their glazing bars still in place, have camber-headed tops, meaning the head of each window opening curves gently upward in a shallow arch rather than finishing in a hard horizontal line. It is a restrained, composed facade of the kind that was fashionable among the Irish gentry and prosperous farming class in the decades around 1800.

The building follows a plan common to that period: five bays across the front, two bays deep on each side, and another five-bay elevation at the rear, where a tall round-headed stairway window marks the centre. The hipped roof, with its projecting eaves and two off-centre chimneys, gives the whole a settled, horizontal quality. Stone-built farm buildings lie to the north and a walled garden to the west, completing a working estate landscape of the kind that once would have been self-sufficient through a combination of cultivation and livestock. To the south, a tower is recorded as a separate structure, its relationship to the house unexplained in what survives of the record but suggestive of an older or ornamental presence on the land.

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Pete F
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