Country house, Creggolympry, Co. Cork

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Country house, Creggolympry, Co. Cork

A country house at Creggolympry in north Cork sits on a bluff above the River Blackwater, and what makes it quietly interesting is the layering of its ambitions across several centuries.

The main structure presents the orderly face of mid-eighteenth-century Georgian design, six bays wide on its southern entrance front, with a central breakfront, that is, a section of the facade that projects slightly forward, framed by quoins at its corners. The doorway is round-headed, fitted with a vertical half-door and a fanlight set within a cut-limestone surround, the whole arrangement topped by a segmental pediment resting on console brackets. Sash windows retain their glazing bars, a cornice-like string course marks the boundary between the first and second floors, and a hipped roof with a central valley sits above a moulded cornice. The effect is composed and deliberate, the vocabulary of a prosperous provincial household presenting itself with some care.

The house holds a few architectural curiosities once you move past the entrance front. The eastern side elevation features circular windows at first-floor level, an unusual touch in a building otherwise governed by rectilinear discipline. The rear elevation is more expressive still, with a central stairway projection that breaks through the roofline as a pedimented gable, its large round-headed stairway window and a circular window above it giving the back of the house an almost ecclesiastical quality. A two-storey hipped addition fills the western side. To the north, formal Italian gardens were laid out in the twentieth century, a deliberate piece of landscape design that contrasts with the working farm buildings clustered on the eastern and northern sides. And to the southwest of the house stands a tower house, a fortified late-medieval or early modern structure of the kind that preceded the country-house tradition across much of Munster, a reminder that occupation of this particular bluff above the Blackwater considerably predates the Georgian facade.

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