Country house, Maryborough, Co. Cork

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Country house, Maryborough, Co. Cork

A ballroom and library that burned in 1914 and were quietly rebuilt as a kitchen is the kind of transformation that tends to go unrecorded in the general histories, yet it is precisely what happened to this substantial early eighteenth-century house to the south-east of Douglas, outside Cork city.

The loss, and the pragmatic response to it, altered the east elevation permanently, and the building that stands today carries its various phases of change quite visibly once you know where to look.

The house is a seven-bay, three-storey structure over a basement, with a garden front to the south that retains its early eighteenth-century character most clearly. A central breakfront, that is a section of the facade that projects slightly forward from the main wall plane, is framed by quoins at each corner, and horizontal stone bank courses divide the floors in a way typical of the period. The sash windows decrease in height as they rise, a compositional device that lends the elevation a subtle formality. The entrance front to the north was refurbished in the mid to late eighteenth century, gaining a central door with a stone surround supporting a pediment and approached by wide stone steps. Inside, good eighteenth-century decorative detail survives, though the east side of the house bears the scars of the 1914 fire in its rebuilt wing. The western approach once included an ornate single-storey lodge whose low square columns stepped up the gable in crowstep fashion, a detail recorded in de Breffny and ffolliott's 1975 survey and compared at the time to the north transept of Rathcormack Church of Ireland; those columns no longer survive. Farmbuildings arranged around a courtyard to the east, with an arched entrance to the north, complete the wider complex. The house is now in office use.

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