Country house, Bohereens, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Main Houses
Blocked-up archways have a way of stopping you in your tracks.
At this country house in Bohereens, a wall running out from the southern gable contains one such arch, now sealed, that once opened onto a rear yard enclosed by a range of two-storey outhouses. It is the kind of detail that suggests a working agricultural and domestic complex, a place organised around practical routines long since abandoned, rather than simply a residence that has grown old.
The house itself is a plain, rectangular, gable-ended structure with a three-bay two-storey front elevation and a steeply-pitched slate roof, the sort of confident, no-nonsense Georgian form that became common across rural Ireland during the eighteenth century. A single-storey addition extends from the northern gable, a later modification that hints at changing needs over time. One point of some debate surrounds how far back the building actually goes. A 1994 study by a scholar named Bary suggested it probably dates to the sixteenth century, a claim that would make it considerably older than its neighbours in the wider Castleisland district. However, a careful examination of the structure as it currently stands finds nothing in its fabric or form that pre-dates the eighteenth century. The sixteenth-century theory remains possible in the abstract, perhaps an earlier building on the same footprint, but the physical evidence does not carry it.
