Country house, Walshestown, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Main Houses
At the south-east corner of a vacant two-storey house in Walshestown, a pair of dressed quoins sit slightly out of place in the otherwise plain rendered facade.
They are, according to the owner, survivors of a much older structure, a castle that once stood adjacent to the house and whose stones were quarried to build it. The house, in other words, consumed its predecessor, and those two corner stones are among the few visible traces of what was taken.
The building itself is a straightforward rectangular form, rendered over random-rubble limestone, with a three-bay entrance front facing east. The windows are plate glass with camber heads, and slim rectangular niches sit between the first-floor windows and the eaves, a restrained decorative touch typical of early nineteenth-century refurbishment in rural Ireland. The central doorway has a round-headed opening with a fanlight and sidelights set into the frame. Gable ends carry chimney stacks, and where the render on the north gable has partially peeled away, brick construction is exposed beneath, suggesting the fabric of the house is more layered than its plain exterior implies. By 1750, the writer Charles Smith noted it in his account of Cork as "a good house", a brief but telling phrase that places it among the more comfortable rural properties of the mid-eighteenth century. It appears to have been substantially refurbished in the early nineteenth century. To the south-east, fragmentary ruined structures of nineteenth-century appearance are built directly on the site of the earlier castle, meaning three distinct phases of occupation, medieval, Georgian, and Victorian, are visible within a short distance of one another, if you know where to look.