Country house, Gortnagross, Co. Cork

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Country house, Gortnagross, Co. Cork

At Gortnagross in north County Cork, a two-storey country house sits vacant, its five-bay facade still presenting a composed, symmetrical face to the south-south-east.

The central door retains its rectangular fanlight, the brick-dressed window openings still frame their plate glass sash windows, and the bowed end elevations give the building an unusually graceful outline for a rural house of its type. It is the kind of place that reads, at a glance, as though it has simply been waiting.

The house dates in appearance to the mid or late eighteenth century, a period when the Georgian idiom was working its way out from Cork city into the surrounding countryside. The design reflects the modest ambitions of that moment rather well: a hipped roof that sweeps down to cover the bowed ends, two chimneys placed slightly off-centre, and a single-storey addition pushed to the rear. To the north, an L-shaped range of single-storey farm buildings survives alongside the house, a reminder that this was always as much a working agricultural holding as a gentleman's residence. The combination of the formal front elevation and the functional yard behind it is a fairly typical arrangement for rural Cork gentry of the period, but the bowed ends lift this example slightly out of the ordinary.

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Pete F
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