Country house, Kilbarry, Co. Cork
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Main Houses
A datestone carved with a partial date, "18?
4", and the initials of a baronet is now the most visible remnant of a substantial Georgian country house that once stood at Kilbarry in County Cork. The house itself is long gone, burned in the early 1920s during the period of widespread destruction that claimed dozens of Irish landed estates, and subsequently demolished. What survives is a farmbuilding range to the north, its arched entrance still carrying that inscribed plaque attributing the work to Sir Augustus Warren, a baronet whose family held the property.
A photograph reproduced by Mark Bence-Jones in 1978 preserves the appearance of the lost building. It shows a two-storey rectangular house with a hipped roof, its east-facing entrance front arranged across six bays with a central two-bay pedimented breakfront projecting slightly forward from the main facade. A breakfront of this kind was a common device in late Georgian architecture, giving rhythm and emphasis to an otherwise flat elevation. The centrepiece was further distinguished by an Ionic portico, a formal columned porch in the classical style, sheltering a doorway flanked by sidelights. The side elevations ran four bays deep, suggesting a house of reasonable volume without being extravagant. The overall composition was typical of the restrained, well-proportioned domestic classicism favoured by the Anglo-Irish gentry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The farmbuildings that remain offer the only physical continuity with the Warren family's occupation of the site. A modern house has been built nearby, but the arch and its plaque are the sole fragments that tie the present landscape to the formal household that once organised itself around the vanished main block to the south.