Country house, Maine, Co. Cork

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Country house, Maine, Co. Cork

What catches the eye at the Maine country house in County Cork is not one building but an ensemble, a two-storey Georgian-style residence accompanied by farm buildings of genuine architectural ambition and a gate lodge detailed well beyond what agricultural necessity would require.

The main house presents a composed three-bay entrance front to the north, its central door arched in a round-headed opening with sidelights folded into the frame and a wide fanlight above. Flanking the door, set directly into the wall, are two matching stone plaques decorated with plain recessed panels, while a pair of smaller armorial plaques, bearing heraldic devices, sit at first-floor level on either side of the window above. The roof is hipped with a central valley and deeply projecting eaves, a form common to prosperous early nineteenth-century rural houses in Munster.

The family associated with this house reaches back considerably further than the current structure suggests. A house on the site was built by one John Gibbins at the end of the seventeenth century or the opening years of the eighteenth, and by 1750, when the Cork historian Charles Smith published his account of the county, a Mr Gibbons was still recorded as the occupant. The building visible today, however, reads as early nineteenth century in character, suggesting a wholesale rebuilding or thorough remodelling at some point after that 1750 record. The farm buildings to the south add a further layer of interest: a two-storey range in cut stone, with a tall central block topped by a pediment and a bellcote, the kind of small bell-housing more usually associated with a chapel or institutional building than a farmyard. The gate lodge continues this thread of careful detailing, incorporating a pediment, a blind lunette (a semicircular recess without glazing), and niches into what might otherwise have been a purely functional structure.

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