House - 16th/17th century, Killowen, Co. Kerry

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House

House – 16th/17th century, Killowen, Co. Kerry

What remains of a house that once stood in the pastureland north of Kenmare Bay is, at this point, almost nothing.

The ruins were cleared away sometime in the 1960s or 1970s by Kerry County Council, leaving behind a site that reads less like an absence and more like a quiet puzzle. What survives is oddly specific: a small stone-built structure to the east of the house site, with interior dimensions of roughly 1.85 metres by 1.35 metres, said to have served as a lavatory. Nearby, a cylindrical stone pillar topped with a hexagonal stone is reputed to be the base of a sundial. At the road entrance, a pair of coursed-stone gate piers still stand at two metres high, marking a demesne threshold that no longer leads anywhere obvious.

The house itself, before its removal, was described as a small two-storey building with a chimney on each gable, a steep slated roof, and a square stableyard to the rear, modest but considered in its layout. Its origins are uncertain, though there appears to have been a dwelling on the site in the seventeenth century, occupied by one Joseph Taylor, an officer in the Cromwellian army. The house later passed through association with the Orpen and Palmer families. There is an additional layer of confusion attached to the site: it has sometimes been mistaken for a neighbouring property in the same townland known as White House, which was the building Sir William Petty referred to as "Killowen house" in his journal of 1675. Petty, the physician, surveyor, and political economist who mapped much of Ireland under Cromwellian administration, was a meticulous observer, so the misidentification has caused some scholarly muddling over the centuries.

The gate piers and the reputed sundial base are the most legible things left to find on the ground. The sundial remnant in particular, a cylindrical shaft surmounted by a hexagonal cap, is an oddly formal survivor for a site that has otherwise been so thoroughly erased.

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