Designed landscape - folly, Cummeen, Co. Sligo

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Designed Landscapes

Designed landscape – folly, Cummeen, Co. Sligo

In a field at Cummeen in County Sligo, there is a circular stone tower that was built, as far as anyone can tell, purely for the sake of having a circular stone tower.

This is the defining quality of a folly: a structure with aesthetic or whimsical intent rather than any practical function, and this one sits at the centre of a walled enclosure, roughly nine metres in diameter and six metres tall, constructed from coursed limestone set in lime mortar. What makes it quietly odd, beyond its existence, is the matter of its door. The original entrance was not at ground level but on the first floor, accessible only by some external means, perhaps a ladder or a removable stair, that is long gone. That first-floor doorway is now covered with ivy, and the ground-floor pointed arch opening on the north side, which may have served as a window or secondary door, is buried under a tangle of nettles and brambles thick enough to obscure the stonework entirely.

The building's fabric offers a few legible details despite the overgrowth. Two string courses, horizontal projecting bands of stone that typically mark the transition between floors, are visible on the exterior, and the first floor retains two windows set within pointed arch openings, a feature associated with Gothic Revival styling, the nineteenth-century taste for medieval-inflected architecture that made follies like this fashionable on the estates of the Anglo-Irish gentry. One of those windows has since been blocked with modern concrete blocks, and the roof itself has been replaced with a modern concrete construction covered in waterproofing material, modifications that suggest the structure has been pressed into some kind of agricultural use at some point, or at least kept standing by pragmatic means rather than careful conservation. According to the former landowner, Mr Jack Lindsey, the first-floor doorway was once the primary point of entry, a detail that would have given the whole building a faintly theatrical quality, requiring a visitor to be lifted or climb before they could step inside.

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