Designed landscape - belvedere, Dromore, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Designed Landscapes
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.