Country house, Ballinvonear, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Main Houses
Above the entrance door of this mid-eighteenth century north Cork country house, set into a classical surround, sits an armorial plaque carrying two dates that have nothing to do with the building itself.
The first, 'OH 1595', predates the house by a century and a half; the second, 'IC 1693', by more than fifty years. Both inscriptions travelled here from Pennywell House in Limerick city, another property once associated with the Harold-Barry family, and their presence on a building constructed generations later gives the facade an oddly layered quality, as though the house is wearing somebody else's credentials at the front door.
The house itself is a composed, rectangular structure of three storeys over a basement, five bays wide on its south-facing entrance front, with cut limestone quoins and a cornice running beneath the eaves. A hipped roof, which pitches inward on all sides rather than ending in gables, sits above two off-centre chimneys, and the central door is framed by sidelights and a block-and-start surround, a form of decorative moulding composed of alternating projecting blocks, topped by a cornice over a flat arch with fanlight glazing above. The Harold-Barry family built the house and, as of the late 1970s at least, still lived there. A hipped two-storey wing extends the west elevation, later additions cluster at the rear to the east, and a three-sided courtyard of farm buildings sits to the north. The ornamental lake to the northeast, visible from the grounds, was not a landscaping luxury but a product of necessity: it was created as relief work around 1847, during the years of the Famine, when landlords and public works schemes channelled labour into projects of this kind as a means of providing wages to those who would otherwise have had nothing.
