house, Gortnacool

Detached six-bay single-storey vernacular house, built c. 1800, with single-cell porch to rear. Rounded thatched roof with netting restraint and timber and metal rope stays to eaves, with smooth rendered chimneystacks with stepped coping and terracotta pots. Roughcast rendered walls, smooth rendered to rear elevation and porch. Square-headed window openings rendered patent surrounds and three-over-three horned timber sash windows and painted sills. Square-headed door opening with replacement timber door. Set within own grounds with complex of farm buildings to rear and with ruinous outbuildings and former thatched dwellings to east and to the south-east.

A vernacular thatched house, sympathetically renovated and now in fine condition, a good example of its type. It would appear originally to have been a four-bay house, later extended by another two bays. The rounded pitched roof is designed to minimise the impact of high winds, demonstrating the subtle adaptation of more common thatch detail to accommodate local climatic variations in exposed areas such as Inishowen. House forming part of a named settlement is marked on the Ordnance Survey first edition six-inch map of c. 1837.