Country house, Roxborough, Co. Cork

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Country house, Roxborough, Co. Cork

Between a ruin and a memory, the remains at Roxborough preserve enough of their original geometry to sketch the outline of a substantial country house, while the vegetation has been doing its best for some time to erase even that.

What survives is fragmentary but legible: walls nearly two metres thick, a west gable still standing to its full height and carrying a chimney, and a south-facing entrance front of three bays that has held on to ground-floor level. At the west end of that entrance front, the door opening has collapsed, but the draw bar sockets remain in place, the slots cut into the masonry that once held the heavy timber bar used to secure the door from inside. It is a small detail, but it gives the ruin a domestic specificity that a bare wall cannot.

The house dates to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century and was built to a modest but solid plan, measuring roughly twelve metres east to west and seven metres north to south internally. A feature worth noting is the base batter visible on the east and west end walls and on a short section of the north wall. A base batter is a deliberate outward slope or thickening at the foot of a wall, used to add structural stability and distribute the load more effectively, a technique associated with serious construction rather than a simple farmhouse. The north-east corner has not survived, and the north wall is largely gone, which gives the ruin its uneven, partially open character. By 1842, when the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced, the place was already recorded as Roxborough House, suggesting it had a recognised name and identity in the landscape even as it entered decline.

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Pete F
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