House - 16th/17th century, Ballyharoon, Co. Cork

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House

House – 16th/17th century, Ballyharoon, Co. Cork

A single gable rising to roughly ten metres in the middle of a Cork pasture is an odd thing to encounter, all the more so because the locals call the field it occupies "Castle Field", even though what stands here was never a castle.

The north wall of a two-storey house with an attic, built from random rubble, is essentially all that remains, yet it survives to its full original height, which gives it an unexpectedly imposing presence against the surrounding farmland.

The structure is associated locally with a family called St. Ledger, a name of Norman-French origin that appears across Munster from the medieval period onwards. The projecting chimney stack on the gable, which extends nearly sixty centimetres from the wall face and spans over two and a half metres in width, is the detail that helps date the building. Projecting external chimney stacks of this kind are characteristic of 17th-century domestic construction in Ireland, distinguishing the house from the earlier tower-house tradition and placing it in a period when more comfortable, less fortified residences were beginning to appear across the countryside. By 1842, when the Ordnance Survey produced its first detailed six-inch maps of Ireland, the building was still recorded as an occupied house, which means the ruin is considerably more recent than its architectural style might suggest at first glance. Somewhere between that survey and the present, the roof came off and the walls reduced to this one surviving gable, while local memory preserved the grander name of "Castle Field" long after any occupant had gone.

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