Country house, Ballyvodock, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Main Houses
In the Ballyvodock townland of County Cork, an early nineteenth-century house has been left to its own devices, its rooms emptied out and its roof holding firm against the weather, at least for now.
What makes it worth pausing over is the specificity of its construction: the two chimneys are lozenge-shaped in plan, a small decorative flourish that sits oddly against the otherwise austere geometry of the building. Details like that tend not to survive in ruined houses, which makes this one a quietly useful record of how a certain class of rural Irish dwelling was put together.
The house is two storeys for the most part, but its southern entrance front carries a central projection that rises to three storeys, giving the facade a modest vertical emphasis. The entrance front is three bays wide, though the door is placed not on the front face of that projection but on its eastern side, an arrangement that slightly wrong-foots a visitor expecting a symmetrical approach. Throughout the building, double sash windows are framed by plaster hood mouldings, small projecting shelves of render above each opening designed to throw rainwater clear of the glass. The roof is steeply pitched with gabled ends, and a matching gabled projection mirrors the entrance feature at the rear of the house. Behind the main building, farm structures arranged around a courtyard survive, suggesting this was a working agricultural property as much as a domestic one, the kind of modest country house that managed both functions without making a great ceremony of either.
