House - medieval, Fethard, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
House
On the south side of Fethard's Main Street in County Tipperary, slightly set back from the building line, there is a structure that presents itself to the world as an ordinary two-storey Georgian-fronted house.
The facade dates to around 1800, and a modern extension fills out the rear. But beneath the pebble-dash render, where patches have fallen away at the south-east corner, limestone quoins emerge, and the east gable reveals something telling: medieval masonry bulging outward where the older, thicker walls meet the thinner nineteenth-century courses added above. The building is, in fact, a modified medieval structure, rectangular in plan, measuring roughly 12.5 metres east to west and 9.5 metres north to south, and built on a slope that falls away southward toward the Clashawley River.
The site appears on the Grace map of 1703 rendered as a stylised castle with a ground-level door onto Main Street, and a 1708 version of the same map shows a single-storey three-bay house with a central chimney. The original entrance to the building was not from the street at all but through a pointed limestone doorway, 2.08 metres high and one metre wide, set into the south wall at what is now basement level, the ground having been effectively raised around it over the centuries. That doorway retains punch-tooling and traces of a drafted margin, and a small stone corbel, a projecting bracket set into the wall to carry a beam or some structural load, survives immediately to its west on the interior face. Inside, a north-south cross-wall divides the building, and within it sits a blocked doorway with a chamfered surround terminating in a broach stop, a carved detail used to finish the edge where the chamfer meets the flat wall surface. This internal doorway now floats nearly a metre above the present floor, a measure of how substantially the levels have been altered over time. Somewhere behind plaster at the east end of the south wall, according to the owner John Whyte, there is a two-light ogee-headed window with decorated spandrels, entirely hidden but still there.
The western portion of the building has its own quiet history of adaptation. A stone vault over the original ground floor at the south end of this section was removed in 1947, and the vaulted chamber it once covered had, in its final years, been used by post office staff to store bicycles. The doorway that gave access to it was blocked up in 1954 when the western section was converted into a shop and extended northward onto the street. Medieval fabric, Georgian refacing, a bicycle store in a vaulted chamber: the building carries its alterations layered one on top of another, legible only in fragments where time or weather has worked the render loose.