House - 17th century, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

House

House – 17th century, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

A hairdresser's occupies the ground floor of what is, above the fascia, an almost intact seventeenth-century town house on the south side of Fethard's Main Street.

The building sits three doors west of the junction with Watergate Street, its domestic upper floors quietly going about their business while customers come and go below. That kind of layering, a medieval or early modern fabric absorbed into the working commercial life of an Irish town, is not unusual in Fethard, which retains one of the best-preserved walled town streetscapes in the country. What makes this particular building worth pausing over is the degree to which its original structure survives.

The house is three storeys tall but occupies a single bay, its interior measuring just over six metres north to south and a little under five and a half east to west. Those walls are close to eighty-five centimetres thick, which gives some sense of how solidly it was built. Stone corbels, small projecting brackets of masonry used to support a beam, floor joist, or timber gallery, survive on the first floor: two on the front wall, one on either side of the window, and a third on the rear wall. A substantial chimney projects into the east wall of the first-floor chamber. The upper floors are reached by a dog-leg stair tucked into the south-west angle of the building, approached from the rear rather than the street. The second floor sits partly within the roof space, where the structure of a collared A-frame truss roof with heavy purlins is still visible, the timbers exposed overhead. Most of the beams at that level have been boxed in at some point, though one original sawn beam remains uncovered.

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