Survey Data
Reg No
15307024
Rating
Regional
Categories of Special Interest
Architectural, Social
Original Use
Court house
Date
1950 - 1960
Coordinates
230740, 259200
Date Recorded
21/07/2004
Date Updated
--/--/--
Description
Detached gable-fronted three-bay single-storey courthouse, built c.1955, flanked by roughcast rendered quadrant walls to east and west. Later single-storey extensions to rear. Pitched tiled roof with cast-iron rainwater goods. Roughcast rendered walls over smooth rendered plinth. Square-headed window openings to side elevations with metal casement swivel windows. Square-headed doorcase to front with timber panelled double-doors, set in projecting flat-roofed brick porch with cast-iron Irish State 'harp' emblem over and reached by flight of curved entrance steps. Set slightly back from road to the east end of Ballynacarrigy.
Appraisal
An attractive mid twentieth-century courthouse, which survives with its early form and character intact. It retains most of its early fabric including the metal casement windows which are rare survivors despite the relative modernity of this structure. This building has some interesting features such as the curved steps, the quadrant flanking walls and the projecting brick porch which lend this small-scale civic building some design merit. It represents the best piece of twentieth century architecture in the village and it blends in well with the earlier, mainly early nineteenth-century fabric. This is a rare example of mid twentieth-century State architecture in Westmeath and is an integral part of the architectural heritage of the locality.