Taynish House, Summer House

DAIRY. This small two-storeyed building of early 19th century date was erected as a dairy, but subsequently converted into a gunroom with bedrooms on the upper floor (en.7). On plan it is a regular octagon measuring 8.9m in span over O.8m walls of harled rubble. At ground-floor level there is an opening in each wall, except that to the N which contains a recessed dummy window. The fanlight above the doorway, in the SW wall, and the windows, appear as tall lancets with intersecting tracery, but their arch-heads seem always to have been dummies and the 'tracery' is mounted on wooden boards; internally these openings appear as conventional rectangular sash-windows. The first-floor windows are of two-centred arched design with intersecting glazing-bars. Simple chimneystacks surmount three of the angles, at the base of the pyramidal slated roof.

The existing internal partitions date from the building's conversion to a gunroom, although the flagstones of the NW part of the ground floor are probably an original feature of the dairy. At each level there is an axial corridor, flanked on the ground floor by four rooms, and on the upper floor by two rooms. The roof-structure, which incorporates a kingpost resting on a transverse beam, has been renewed.

RCAHMS 1992, visited August 1984