House - 17th century, Timoney, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

House

House – 17th century, Timoney, Co. Tipperary

What survives of what was once the main residence of a Cromwellian settler's family in County Tipperary is a single wall: the south gable of a two-storey house with attic, 7.4 metres wide, still coated in its original gravel dash and rising to a pair of diagonal stone chimney-shafts at the apex.

No other walls remain above ground. The gable has been absorbed into the enclosing wall of a working farmyard, where it now keeps company with a small 18th or 19th-century tower to its west, complete with red-brick pointed arches, and a building whose east gable contains a concrete twin-light traceried window. The mixture of centuries compressed into one yard is quietly disorienting.

The story behind the gable begins around 1653, when James Hutchinson, a captain in Cromwell's army, settled at the place then called Knockballymagher, later known as Rockforest. His son, also James Hutchinson of Knockballymagher and Timoney, married Mary Bennet in 1681 and had two sons; the younger of them, John, inherited the lands at Timoney. The family eventually built Timoney Park, a grander house roughly 390 metres to the north-north-east, during the 19th century, and the older building was likely their principal residence before that move. The surviving gable preserves traces of the domestic life it once contained: a large ground-floor fireplace, 2.25 metres wide, whose chimney-arch was rebuilt in red brick at some later point, shows evidence of two separate flues and a probable wall oven to its west side, the opening now filled in. A smaller fireplace was inserted at first-floor level, probably in the 18th or 19th century, suggesting the building remained in use and was modified over time rather than simply abandoned when the new house went up nearby.

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