House - 18th/19th century, Cashel, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
House
Set slightly back from the bustle of Cashel's Main Street, the building now known as Bailey's carries a small but telling detail on its front face: a heart-shaped datestone, carved with the year 1709, positioned above the central first-floor window.
It is the kind of thing that repays a second glance, a quiet declaration of age embedded in an otherwise workmanlike Georgian facade.
The building is a five-bay, three-storey structure arranged on a T-plan, meaning it has a projecting return at the rear rather than a simple rectangular footprint, and it sits over a vaulted basement, a feature common in substantial town houses of the period where storage or service functions were kept below street level. The walls, at 0.65 metres thick, are rendered in plaster, and the rear elevation was once hung with slates for additional weatherproofing, a practical measure often used on exposed rear faces in Irish towns. The cut limestone roof coping and the broad limestone steps leading to the narrow central doorway are both original to the structure. Inside, alterations have accumulated over the centuries, as they tend to in a building put to continuous use, but the original staircase in the projecting rear return survives, just over a metre wide and still in place after more than three hundred years. The heart-shaped datestone pushes the building's origins back to 1709, making it older than its Georgian proportions might initially suggest, and placing its construction in the reign of Queen Anne, well before Cashel's streetscape took the form most visitors see today.