When a blaze tore through the country house at Ballinterry, County Cork, in the summer of 1991, the subsequent stripping of plaster from the walls exposed something that had been quietly concealed for generations: blocked windows on the north gable and the stairwell extension, along with changes in the proportions of the windows on the western elevation. The house, it turned out, had a more complicated past written into its fabric than its composed exterior had suggested.

The building itself is a two-storey, L-shaped structure with brick chimneys and a concave limestone cornice that runs along the roofline but stops just short of the gable ends, a detail that gives it a slightly unresolved, handsome quality. The entrance front faces west across seven bays, two of which are now blocked, and retains a vertical half-door with a rectangular fanlight above, sash windows with glazing bars, and shallow reveals. A central hipped stairway projection extends to the rear. The L-shape and the particular form of the cornice draw close comparison with part of nearby Ballymaloe House, and on that basis the Ballinterry house is thought to date to the late seventeenth century. What makes this chronology especially interesting is that the house appears to have been built inside a fortified bawn, the kind of defensive enclosure, essentially a walled or ditched yard, associated with plantation-era settlement in Ireland, which probably dates to the earlier part of that same century. The house, in other words, grew up within an older defensive structure, a sequence that speaks to a period of gradual transition from fortified living to something more settled and domestic. Farm buildings and a walled garden survive to the north, and to the south there are outbuildings. Tucked beside these are a small number of circular corn stands, roughly three metres across and about a metre high, with concave walls; these low, solid platforms were used to store harvested grain clear of the damp ground, and their survival here is quietly unusual.