Abbeyville House, Killeenadeema, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
House
There is a particular kind of rural Irish house that resists easy categorisation, neither grand enough to be called a manor nor modest enough to be dismissed as a farmhouse.
The house at Abbeyville, in the south Galway townland of Killeenadeema, belongs to that quiet middle ground, and its distinction lies largely in the windows. Across the front façade, each opening is tripartite, meaning a wider central pane is flanked by a narrower one on either side, a arrangement that gives the whole elevation an unusual internal rhythm. The symmetry operates at two scales simultaneously: the three bays of the house mirror one another, and within each bay the window itself repeats the same three-part logic.
The house dates to around 1820, a period when a certain restrained Georgian sensibility was still governing domestic architecture in the Irish countryside. Around 1910, the windows were replaced or substantially reworked, and the two-over-two sliding sash windows that remain, with their ogee horns and tooled limestone sills, reflect the tastes of that later Edwardian moment. Ogee horns are the small curved projections at the base of a sash window frame where the upper and lower sashes meet, a detail that became fashionable in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The front door is double-leafed and timber-panelled, framed by sidelights and a tripartite overlight above, so that even the entrance echoes the tripartite geometry of the windows. The walls are roughcast rendered over rubble limestone, with a smooth plinth course at the base, and the roof is slated with a half-hip at each end, the ridgeline finished with terracotta ridge tiles. The entrance to the site is marked by wrought-iron gates set between tooled limestone piers, with rubble limestone walls extending to either side.