Designed landscape - belvedere, Dromore, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Designed Landscapes

Designed landscape – belvedere, Dromore, Co. Cork

In north Cork there is a tower that no longer stands, beside a house that was demolished almost as soon as it was built, leaving only a basement and a memory.

What survives of the Dromore belvedere exists now primarily in a single photograph taken in 1909, showing a compact two-tiered turret rising from a rectangular ground floor pierced by a semicircular archway. Above that base sat a slimmer tower, possibly circular or octagonal in plan, with a bluntly pointed window opening on its south-western face. A belvedere of this kind was typically a small ornamental structure placed within a designed landscape to command a view or simply to ornament the grounds of a country house. By 1909 it was already a ruin. Today there is no visible surface trace at all.

The story attached to the adjacent house is the more arresting one. Old Dromore, whose substantial basement remains appear in the foreground of the 1909 photograph roughly forty metres south-west of the tower, is thought to have been built around 1779 by Lord Muskerry. According to local tradition, he knocked it down after only a single night's occupation, using the proceeds from demolishing the building to repay the debts he had accumulated in constructing it. Whether or not the account is literally true, the basement remained visible and was recorded on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842, 1904, and 1935, alongside the footprint of the belvedere itself, a small rectangle of roughly five metres by five metres. That both features continued to appear on maps across nearly a century of surveys suggests they were recognised landmarks even in ruin, traces of a designed landscape that had barely functioned before it began to disappear.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Designed landscape – belvedere, Dromore, Co. Cork. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement