Country house, Ballinure, Co. Cork

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Country house, Ballinure, Co. Cork

The south-facing entrance front of this mid-eighteenth-century house at Ballinure is something of a textbook exercise in Georgian compositional grammar, played out in rendered walls and cut limestone against a view down to the Douglas Estuary.

Seven bays wide, with a three-bay central breakfront rising to a pediment punctuated by an oculus, the façade layers its window types with careful deliberation: a pedimented door with fanlight at ground level, a Venetian window directly above it on the first floor, and a Diocletian window, the semi-circular form divided by two uprights, at the second. The sash windows diminish in height as they climb, a convention of the period that gives the building its sense of proportion without drawing attention to itself.

The house dates from the middle of the eighteenth century and is three storeys tall and three bays deep, with limestone band courses, quoins, and a cornice providing the structural punctuation across the rendered exterior. A hipped roof with a central valley sits above it all. Later generations left their marks to the rear in the form of numerous additions, and a Victorian conservatory was added to the western elevation, the kind of glazed appendage that became fashionable across Irish country houses in the second half of the nineteenth century. To the west also lies an ice house, a vaulted underground chamber used to store blocks of ice cut in winter, which would keep food cool through the warmer months. The farm buildings to the north have since been converted into a heritage centre, giving the complex a second life beyond its agricultural origins.

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Pete F
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