Loughlohery House, Loughlohery, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
House
When the Ordnance Survey teams moved through Tipperary in 1840, they noted this house simply as 'a very old building', which tells you something about its age even then.
What survives today is a six-bay, two-storey structure roughly 25 metres long, but the building has been quietly rearranging itself for centuries, and the closer you look, the more the original layout reasserts itself against the alterations.
The house is thought to date from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, and its fabric is full of small contradictions. The front doorway, for instance, does not appear to occupy its original position; the embrasure splays inward in the manner of a window opening, suggesting the entrance was simply punched through what had been a wall light. The staircase, now offset to one side, has been altered too. At the northern end, the house has been shortened; the shell of a lost room still stands, complete with a fireplace set into the gable wall. At the southern end, one room sits lower than the floor level of the rest of the house, and the fireplace now installed there was moved from the ballroom. The front wall is a substantial 0.73 metres deep, and the first-floor windows press up tight under the eaves, a detail consistent with the sash windows they replaced. On the south gable, a large opening has been blocked up, its outline still legible in the stonework, and it is wide enough to suggest a carriage entrance.
The eastern range, running off the south end of the house, compounds the sense of a building that once served a much more layered domestic world. It held the steward's accommodation alongside a former ballroom, the latter still retaining its moulded cornice and a fireplace at its eastern end. A passage once connected the courtyard directly to the ballroom, and a first-floor doorway, now blocked, once allowed access from the main house into the range above ground level. Taken together, these features describe something closer to a small rural complex than a simple country house, one whose various rooms and passages have been progressively closed off, repurposed, or simply forgotten.