Corratanty House

Detached five-bay two-storey house and model farm, built c.1800, with single-bay full-height return to rear, lean-to porch to rear re-entrant angle and recent gabled porch to front elevation. Pitched natural slate roof, with roughcast rendered chimneystacks, to all gable ends and mid-ridge, with recent external stack to return. Cast-iron rainwater goods. Roughcast rendered walls, with smooth rendered and painted block-and-start quoins, and smooth rendered first floor sill course to rear and side elevations. Square-headed window openings with replacement uPVC windows, rendered and painted reveals, and painted stone sills throughout. Square-headed door openings with recent timber doors and recent sidelights. Roughcast rendered boundary wall with painted stone coping, having wrought-iron pedestrian gate flanked by square-plan roughcast piers with moulded caps to north-west of house. Multiple-bay two-storey outbuildings forming L-shaped block to west, with pitched and half-hipped slate roofs, coursed rubble limestone walls with brick eaves course, block-and-start surrounds to square-headed window and door openings, having recent fittings, and blocked round-headed door opening to ground floor of east elevation of most northerly building. Main entrance to complex from north-east, having splayed smooth rendered wall with square-plan gate and corner piers, with stone cap having orb finial, and replacement double-leaf metal gates. Located south of rural country road, west of Castleblayney, Keady and Armagh (CK&A) branch of Great Northern Railway, completed 1910.

An early nineteenth-century house, Corratanty has an ordered layout, typical of the model farm type. A model farm was an experimental farm, commonly built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which researched and demonstrated improvements in agricultural techniques, efficiency, and building layout. Education and commitment to improving welfare standards of workers were also aspects of the ideal farm movement, although many of the model farms built in Ireland were economically unviable as the owners did not often actually rely on the sites for food or income. Viscount Templetown of the Upton family had a large stake in the Blayney Estate, owning much of the northern Parish of Mucko, in which Corratanty lies. The latter also owned corn and flax mills at Carrickaslane to the north. The current house is named on the 1835 and 1908 Ordnance Survey maps as Corratanty. The associated outbuildings do not appear on the 1835 map and were not constructed until c.1850, appearing on the Griffith Valuation map c.1858. The associated farm buildings, originally arranged in an E-shaped plan, illustrate the importance of farming on this model farm.