Country house, Mohona, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Main Houses
In the townland of Mohona in County Cork stands a country house that has slipped almost entirely from the record.
Its presence is noted, its category logged, but the details that would bring it into focus, its builder, its dates, the family who lived there, the alterations it may have undergone, have not been preserved in any accessible form. That absence is itself a kind of story.
Country houses of this type were built in considerable numbers across Cork and the wider province of Munster from the late seventeenth century onward, often by Anglo-Irish gentry or prosperous farming families consolidating land and status in the post-Williamite landscape. Some were modest two-storey affairs in cut limestone, others more ambitious compositions with flanking wings or walled demesnes. Without further detail attached to this particular example, it is impossible to say where on that spectrum the Mohona house sits, or whether it survives in any meaningful condition.