Country house, Rylanes (Connello Upper By.), Co. Limerick
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A date plaque set into a rendered wall is rarely the most dramatic feature of a country house, yet the one at Rylanes tells a surprisingly layered story.
Cut from painted stone and accompanied by a recessed cross motif, it records 1683, making this three-storey house in County Limerick one of the earlier surviving examples of its kind in the region. What catches the eye almost as much, though, is the Dutch gable rising above the 1890 addition to the south elevation, a curvilinear or stepped roofline treatment more commonly associated with the Low Countries and with certain Ulster plantation buildings than with rural Limerick. Seeing the two periods of construction side by side, the late seventeenth-century core and the Victorian-era remodelling, gives the building an architectural honesty that grander estates sometimes lack.
According to the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, the house was built in 1683 and then substantially altered toward the end of the nineteenth century. The later works, carried out around 1890, added a single-bay two-storey extension to the south and a two-bay three-storey return to the rear east elevation, effectively wrapping new accommodation around the older structure. The Dutch gable, with its render copings and the date plaque below, is the most conspicuous sign of that Victorian intervention. The main body of the house is roughcast rendered, with pitched slate roofs and rendered chimneystacks, while the boundary walls to the west are rubble stone covered in render, a common enough vernacular technique in this part of Munster. A pair of square-profile rendered piers topped with urn finials marks the pedestrian entrance, and limestone steps lead up to a porch fitted with a half-glazed timber panelled door.
Rylanes lies within the old barony of Connello Upper in County Limerick, a quiet agricultural stretch that draws few visitors with any particular agenda. The house is in private ownership and is not open to the public, so the view from the road or the entrance piers is as close as most people will get. The limestone steps and the entrance piers with their urn finials are visible from the west, and the Dutch gable can be picked out above the roofline when the angle is right. Those with an interest in vernacular building traditions or in the long overlap between seventeenth-century construction methods and later Victorian taste will find the exterior worth a slow look. The National Inventory record, compiled by Denis Power and registered under number 21827003, provides the most detailed publicly available description of the building's fabric for anyone wishing to read further before making the journey.
