Building, Gortderraree, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Utility Structures
In a Kerry pasture beside an unremarkable road, a low one-storey building suddenly sprouts a three-storey tower from its centre.
The combination is quietly arresting: a rectangular, gable-ended farmhouse-like structure, built in rusticated sandstone ashlar, with a square tower rising from its north-west-facing front elevation as though it belongs to an altogether different, grander building.
The tower carries a plaque on its north-west face inscribed "HAH 1837", which gives the structure its only firm date and a partial identity. The initials presumably record the individual who commissioned or completed the building, though who "HAH" was remains unelaborated. The construction itself reflects some care and expense for its period: round-headed window openings with rusticated limestone surrounds, a round-headed door at ground-floor level in the tower, and a parapet at the tower's summit supported on corbels, the small stone or brick projections that carry the weight of the parapet wall above. Rusticated stonework, in which the masonry is cut with deliberately rough or chamfered faces to give a sense of solidity and texture, was fashionable in estate and civic architecture of the period, and its use here suggests a proprietor with ambitions beyond the strictly functional. The south-west end of the low building is a concrete addition, clearly later than the original fabric.
What the building was actually used for is not recorded. Its form does not quite fit any single familiar category: not a conventional dwelling, not a gate lodge, not a folly in the strictest sense. The tower, with its parapet and corbels, gestures towards the castellated aesthetic that was popular among Irish landowners in the early nineteenth century, when a modest tower could confer a certain romantic dignity on an otherwise plain structure. Whatever its original purpose, it sits in pasture today, partially rendered, its 1837 plaque still legible, a small puzzle in sandstone.