The High Window

Wynnstay House, Clonskeagh

The stairs, little more than loose planks held up by scaffolding, creak as you climb up. You cling close to the pocked wall.

We find an old plan of the house, an architect’s blueprint. A yellowed copy of The Sun, dated March 2011, on the table. A heavy metal safe, open and empty. You look down and through the cracks in the rotted wood you can see two floors below.

At the top you climb up the tiles to the apex of the roof and look over, back down the long drive. There is a car parked at the makeshift gate now, a man stood at the entrance. You duck back down. We stay, crouched and silent, on the rooftop for a long time. But when we come back down all the flights of stairs, clamber down the wall and rusted girders to hard ground again, he is gone and the car too.

Wynnstay House is an old landlord’s country house concealed behind high walls on the Clonskeagh Road. A protected structure, it was sold in 2013 for €1.1 million. In the Irish Times I found the record of an appeal in 2007 for planning permission to change the property from office to residential use. The floors are littered with building materials and old tools, the grounds piled with lumber from felled trees. There is nobody here. It remains derelict.

Photography: GeorgiaLalor/BlackfishMedia