Country house, Rathonoane, Co. Cork
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There is something quietly contradictory about the country house at Rathonoane.
Its entrance front presents a composed, five-bay Georgian face to the world, complete with a central doorway framed by engaged Corinthian columns and a fanlight, exactly the kind of ordered classicism that early nineteenth-century Irish gentry favoured. Yet immediately above that door, on the first floor, sits a rectangular window filled with Neo-Perpendicular tracery, a Gothic Revival detail of the sort more commonly associated with church architecture. The two styles do not fight each other so much as coexist in a slightly unexpected way, suggesting a builder or patron with varied tastes, or perhaps a house that absorbed more than one moment of fashion as it was finished and furnished.
The building is a rectangular two-storey structure of early to mid-nineteenth-century appearance, with side elevations two bays deep and a hipped roof carried on two off-centre chimneys. To the rear, a shallow central projection contains a large round-headed window, adding a further note of architectural interest to what might otherwise read as a straightforward rural house. About 700 metres to the north-north-west, the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records a separate building called Forest House. That structure no longer survives, leaving only its name on an old map as evidence that the immediate landscape once contained at least one other substantial residence.