Country house, Ardmore, Co. Cork
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Main Houses
Near Passage West in County Cork, a substantial three-storey country house from the mid to late eighteenth century quietly holds a biographical footnote that its plain ashlar facade gives no indication of: it is recorded as the birthplace of a Captain Roberts, a detail noted by Mould in 1991 but one that has attracted little wider attention.
The house presents a five-bay entrance front to the north, though the original doorway has been obscured by a later central ashlar porch, that is, a formal stone-dressed entrance canopy added at some point after the original construction. Flanking the porch are two-storey, three-bay bows, curved or angled projecting wings that were also later additions, giving the facade a layered quality that reflects successive alterations rather than a single unified design. The roofline is gable-ended, with chimneys positioned on the gables rather than the ridge, and a parapet wall with a cornice runs along the elevation. Further additions to the rear are also gabled. On either side of the front elevation, tall ashlar archways, one of them now blocked, originally provided carriage or working access through to a rear yard, a practical arrangement typical of larger rural houses of this period where the working life of an estate ran parallel to, but separate from, the formal domestic front.