This one at Gneeves in north County Cork sits on the north side of a road, facing outward with a front of four bays and a shallow porch set to the left of centre. The hipped roof, where the ends slope down as well as the sides rather than finishing in a flat gable, still carries its thatch, and two chimneys rise from off-centre positions to the left and right. The asymmetry of the whole thing, the door not quite where you might expect it, the chimneys not quite balanced, gives the building a slightly improvisational quality that is entirely characteristic of rural Irish vernacular building tradition. It has been abandoned.

Vernacular houses of this type were built by and for farming families, typically without an architect and using local materials and the accumulated knowledge of local craftspeople. Thatch in this part of Cork was most commonly water reed or straw, and the hipped roof form helped shed rain efficiently on all sides. The shallow porch, modest as it is, suggests a household that was not entirely without means or comfort. What is harder to recover now is the timeline of occupation, the generations who moved through that off-centre door, or the precise point at which the house was finally given up. The north Cork countryside holds a good number of such buildings, remnants of a rural settlement pattern that contracted sharply during and after the nineteenth century, but few have survived with their thatched roofs even partially intact.