Country house, Srugreana, Co. Kerry
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A country house in Srugreana, County Kerry, spent several years on the official record as a possible abbey.
The Survey and Monuments Record of 1990 listed it under that tentative ecclesiastical category, which would have placed it in the same company as medieval monastic remains scattered across the Irish countryside. By 1997, however, it had been quietly dropped from the Record of Monuments and Places altogether, the classification having apparently failed to hold up to scrutiny.
The building itself, according to Bary's 1994 survey, is a late Victorian or early Edwardian house, likely dating from somewhere in the final decades of the nineteenth century or the opening years of the twentieth. How it came to be recorded as a possible abbey in the first place is not explained in the available sources, but the misidentification is a small reminder of how ambiguous a structure can appear when seen only from a distance, or when local memory and architectural form are read together imperfectly. The gap between the two official records, seven years during which the site carried a classification it apparently did not deserve, is a modest curiosity in itself.