Country house, Clonmoyle, Co. Cork

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Country house, Clonmoyle, Co. Cork

At Clonmoyle in mid-Cork, a two-storey country house stands abandoned, its entrance front still composed and almost formal despite the decay.

The round-headed doorway at the centre, flanked by matching round-headed sidelights, gives the facade a restrained Georgian quality, and the sash windows with their glazing bars intact suggest a building that was once carefully maintained. On the first floor, a large window opening retains the remains of a wooden pediment carried on substantial wooden corbels, a detail that speaks to the ambitions of whoever commissioned the remodelling.

The earliest recorded form of the house appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 as a plain rectangular structure. At some later point it was significantly reworked: curved bows were added to the fronts of the side elevations, softening what would have been a rather austere outline, and two hipped-roof projections were built out at the rear. This kind of incremental enlargement was common among middling landed families in nineteenth-century Ireland, extending and refining a functional farmhouse into something with greater social pretension, without ever quite committing to a full rebuilding. A roofless farm building survives to the north-west of the main house, a remnant of the working landscape that would have surrounded the residence.

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Pete F
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