Country house, Knocknaseed, Co. Kerry

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Country house, Knocknaseed, Co. Kerry

At Knocknaseed in County Kerry, a one-storey country house sits abandoned in open pasture on a gently sloping hillside, its entrance front still composed enough to suggest what it once was.

Five bays wide, with a central doorway flanked by engaged wooden Ionic columns and topped by a fanlight, it has the careful proportions of early nineteenth-century rural architecture aspiring to a certain dignity. The camber-headed windows retain their sash frames and glazing bars, and in places the brick surrounds beneath the render have begun to show through, giving the facade an air of slow self-disclosure.

The house was built sometime in the early 1800s, but the site appears to have an older domestic history. A ruined facade survives in the northwest corner of the surrounding farmyard, and this fragmentary wall may belong to an earlier house on the same ground, one mentioned in a 1994 study of the area by Bary. The two structures, if that reading is correct, represent successive attempts to establish a household on this southeast-facing slope, the earlier building eventually superseded and left to crumble in the corner of its own yard. Farm buildings still stand arranged around the yard to the north of the house, suggesting that the agricultural function of the holding outlasted the domestic one, or at least outlasted whoever last kept the main house in habitable order. The hipped roof, with its projecting eaves and single long central chimney running along the ridge, remains largely intact, which makes the abandonment feel more recent than the architecture would otherwise imply.

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Pete F
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