Country house, Castletreasure, Co. Cork

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Country house, Castletreasure, Co. Cork

At Castletreasure in County Cork, there is a house that cannot quite make up its mind what it wants to be.

From the outside, it reads as a modest single-storey rural dwelling, the kind of restrained late Georgian building that once dotted the Cork countryside in considerable numbers. But at each end, a square two-storey tower rises and pushes slightly forward of the main facade, giving the whole composition an air of mild architectural theatre, as though the builder wanted the dignity of a castellated outline without committing fully to the expense.

The house dates to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and its entrance front faces east across five bays. The central door is framed by a limestone surround with a rectangular fanlight above it, and wide sidelights on either side, though these are now blocked. The sash windows retain their glazing bars, and a dormer window sits centrally in the roofline. The towers carry pointed window openings on their first floors, all of them also blocked, which gives that upper level a slightly sealed, watchful quality. To the rear, wide half-hipped two-storey projections extend the building's footprint in a more utilitarian direction. Patches of weatherslating, a technique in which slates are fixed to external walls rather than just roofs as a defence against driving rain, are still visible on the structure, a small material detail that speaks to the practical realities of building in the wet south of Ireland.

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Pete F
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