House - vernacular house, Clogher, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
House
At the Ballynamona crossroads in Clogher, County Cork, there once stood a house that was recorded in some detail and then, quietly, ceased to exist.
It was demolished after the site inspection that produced its description, leaving behind only a written outline of something that can no longer be visited or seen.
The house dated from the mid to late nineteenth century and sat at right angles to the eastern side of the crossroads, a positioning that gave it an oblique relationship to the road rather than the more typical direct frontage. Its southern face ran to six bays, an unusually generous spread for a rural vernacular dwelling of that period, with an off-centre door to the left sheltered by a shallow porch and a second door set at the eastern end. The roof was hipped and thatched, a form in which the roof slopes down on all four sides rather than ending in flat gable walls, and a brick chimney rose off-centre to the left. A farm building stood to the front of the house, suggesting the whole arrangement was a working agricultural holding rather than a purely domestic one. Vernacular houses of this type were built to local tradition and local need, without an architect, using materials and methods passed through practice rather than drawing boards, and relatively few survive in anything close to their original condition.
What makes this particular record quietly affecting is that the building no longer exists. The description captures a specific configuration of doors and bays and thatch that has since been lost entirely, making the written account the only remaining evidence of how it looked and where it stood.