Country house, Farahy, Co. Cork

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Country house, Farahy, Co. Cork

At Farahy in north Cork, the site of what was once a substantial Georgian country house is now marked chiefly by entrance piers, two estate lodges, and some farm buildings.

The house itself was demolished around 1961, leaving behind just enough to suggest the scale of what once stood here. That absence carries a particular weight, because this was Bowen's Court, the ancestral home of Elizabeth Bowen, one of the twentieth century's most distinctive novelists, whose own book about the house and family became an elegy for a world already fading.

Henry Bowen completed the house in 1775, building it close to the site of an earlier family residence. The architect's name was never firmly established, though the design has been attributed to Isaac Rothery. Photographs taken in the early twentieth century show a three-storey house over a basement, with an entrance front of ashlar limestone seven bays wide. A central three-bay breakfront, framed by quoins, gave the facade its formal rhythm, and a pedimented doorcase anchored the composition at ground level. Sash windows with moulded surrounds ran across each storey. The south-west elevation extended to six bays, while the north-east elevation was never actually completed; it was infilled during the late nineteenth century with lower service wings, giving the house an asymmetry that its original design had never intended. Most unusually, the entire upper floor was given over to a single long room, planned as a ballroom, running the full length of the building beneath a hipped roof with a central valley. Elizabeth Bowen inherited the house and wrote about it at length, tracing the Bowen family's connection to the land across several generations, but she was eventually forced to sell it in 1959. The new owner demolished it shortly afterwards.

A Church of Ireland church survives on the south-eastern edge of the former demesne, and the entrance piers and lodges remain in the landscape, giving some sense of where the approach to the house once began. The site itself is quiet, and what remains is fragmentary, but the fragments are legible enough for anyone familiar with Bowen's own account of the place.

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