Country house, Mountdesert, Co. Cork
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Main Houses
What survives of Mountdesert house in County Cork is not the house itself but the ghost of an entrance, a pair of stone piers still topped with urns and pineapples, standing at the threshold of something that no longer exists.
The house was abandoned and demolished in the 1940s after a sanatorium was built nearby, leaving the gateway as a kind of punctuation mark without a sentence to follow it.
The house itself is known mainly through an old photograph. It was a substantial five-bay, two-storey structure, gable-ended, with single-bay two-storey projections on either side and a hipped roof, the kind of measured, symmetrical composition that characterises early Georgian domestic architecture in Ireland. Mark Bence-Jones, whose 1978 survey of Irish country houses remains a standard reference, dates the original building to the early eighteenth century and notes that it was extended during the later Georgian period. The entrance gateway, with its dressed stone piers and their carved ornamental finials, came later still, probably in the early nineteenth century. Pineapples, which appear here as decorative stone carvings on the pier tops, were a recurring motif in Georgian and Regency architecture, associated with hospitality and exotic prestige at a time when the fruit itself was a rarity in Ireland. The decision to demolish the house rather than adapt or mothball it when the sanatorium arrived nearby reflects a pattern common to mid-twentieth-century Ireland, where the costs of maintaining large country houses outweighed any perceived reason to keep them standing.