Mount Leader, Millstreet, Co Cork

Bence-Jones, Mark. A Guide to Irish Country Houses (originally published as Burke’s Guide to Country Houses volume 1 Ireland by Burke’s Peerage Ltd. 1978); Revised edition 1988 Constable and Company Ltd, London.   

p. 215. “(Leader/IFR) A two storey pedimented Georgian house with a single-storey Ionic portico and an eaved roof.” 

The Buildings of Ireland. Cork City and County. Frank Keohane. Yale University Press: New Haven and London. 2020. 

p. 32. The bulk of Cork’s not inconsiderable stock of country houses were built between 1790 and 1820, a period of unprecendented agricultural prosperity: incomes from estates increased by 100-150 %, and in some cases by as much as 300%. Most of these houses are generous rectangular blocks without architectural ambitions, with symmetrical facades of two or three storeys. It is only in their detail that they differ from their C18 forebears. Roughcast begins to give way to stucco, and the availability of larger slates allowed the pitch of roofs to be lowered, so that parapets designed to disguise steep roofs fell out of fashion, and by the 1820s deep bracketed eaves were popular. Windows became larger, and were often filled with sashes of astonishing delicacy. [p. 34] The Wyatt window, a wide tripartite type, could be used to emphasize the centre of a façade in a similar way to the C18 Venetian window, but was also commonly paired on each side of the entrance. Doorways, of stone or timber, were given fanlights rather than pediments, often to a tripartite pattern incorporating narrow side-lights. All in all, the repetition of design suggests a taste for well-tested conformity over modish experimentation. 

There is generally little to differentiate glebe houses of the period from the smaller of these houses. A common and economical pattern was to place the entrance in the narrow side elevation to allow a pair of reception rooms to fill the view front. The origin of this plan is not known, but in 1788 the Rev. Daniel Beaufort inspected a glebe house being built at Midleton, describing it as ‘a very odd plan without a door in front.’ 

Larger Classical houses of this period are comparatively rare, many of course having been lost. Longueville (Mallow), Kilmoney Abbey (Carrigaline), Mount Leader (Millstreet) and Castle Park (Kanturk) all feature elegent cut-stone columnar porches. Gortshagh near Charleville, though modest in scale, is satisfyingly monumental, with a massive central stack, and a porch with pared-down Greek Doric columns in antis. A tour-de-force Greek Revival portico of sublime purity exists at Dromdihy at Killeagh, a house happily about to undergo rehabilitation after decades of ruination. Bearforest (Mallow) is a classic villa designed by Richard Morrison; the arrangement of Wyatt windows in shallow arched recesses and the central bow ringed with columns derives from the work of both James Wyat and John Soane. The finest house of the period is Fota, a mid-C18 house enlarged and remodelled in the 1820s by Richard and William Vitruvius Morrison, then the leading country house architects in Ireland. Within, they formed a spatially complex hallway with adjoining vestibules, to connect a sequence of opulent reception rooms decorated with their richest plasterwork. The sequence of lobbies and landings on the upper floors is no less thrilling.