House - 17th century, Fethard, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
House
On the north side of Fethard's Main Street, at the eastern end, there is nothing left to see.
That absence is itself the point. What once stood here was a substantial mansion house, already important enough to be named in Sir John Everard's will of 1623, and the building passed through centuries of use, adaptation, destruction, and clearance until the last of it disappeared in the 1960s. What survives is documentary rather than physical: a set of early eighteenth-century maps that preserve, in stylised form, what the house once looked like.
The Grace maps of 1703 and 1708 offer two slightly different readings of the building. The earlier depicts a two-storey structure with a central doorway approached by steps, a slated roof carrying a large and a smaller chimney along the ridge, and what appear to be octagonal chimneys with ball finials at either gable, a detail it shared with the almshouse directly across the road. The 1708 version is considered the more accurate of the two, and its ground-floor arrangement, showing only a large doorway with no windows at street level, has led to the suggestion that the lower floor served as storage and that the residential rooms occupied the first floor and attic above, each level lit by three windows. In 1750, the Everard family's Fethard properties were sold to Thomas Barton, a wine merchant based in Bordeaux, and by 1763 he had replaced the old mansion with a new house, possibly incorporating some fabric of the earlier building. That replacement was itself converted into a barracks in 1805, burned during the Civil War in 1922, and finally cleared of its last remaining fabric in the 1960s. Three building phases, across three centuries, and now nothing standing to show for any of them.