Doonanarroo House

Detached four-bay two-storey farmhouse, extant 1896. Pitched slate roof with clay ridge tiles, fine roughcast chimney stacks having corbelled stepped stringcourses below capping, concrete or rendered coping to gables, and plastic rainwater goods on timber eaves boards on exposed timber rafters[?] retaining cast-iron octagonal or ogee hoppers and downpipes. Fine roughcast battered walls with rendered strips to corners. Square-headed window openings with rendered sills[?], and concealed dressings framing two-over-two timber sash windows having part exposed sash boxes. Set in own grounds perpendicular to road with rendered piers to perimeter having stepped capping supporting flat iron double gates.

A farmhouse representing an interesting component of the later nineteenth-century domestic built heritage of County Mayo with the underlying vernacular basis of the composition suggested by such traits as the alignment perpendicular to the road; the compact rectilinear plan form; the feint battered silhouette; and the somewhat disproportionate bias of solid to void in the massing compounded by the diminishing in scale of the openings on each floor producing a graduated visual impression. Having been well maintained, the elementary form and massing survive intact together with substantial quantities of the original fabric, thus upholding the character or integrity of a farmhouse having historic connections with the Craven family including Thomas Craven (b. 1851), 'Farmer' (NA 1911); and Charles Henry Craven (1926-99) 'of Doonanarrow [sic]'.