House - 17th century, Boytonrath, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
House
In the townland of Boytonrath in County Tipperary, a house once stood that a nineteenth-century observer considered the oldest country house he had ever seen.
Nothing of it remains above ground today, and the building that occupies the site appears to date from the nineteenth or early twentieth century. The original structure has effectively vanished, leaving its existence dependent on a handful of historical documents and the testimony of one particularly struck visitor.
The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a Cromwellian-era land record compiled to document Irish property ownership after the wars of the 1640s, describes a thatched house in Boytonrath that was under the proprietorship of James Butler, noted in the survey as an Irish Papist, in 1640. The designation reflects the survey's systematic recording of Catholic landowners, whose properties were subject to confiscation under the transplantation policies of the period. The house itself gains further definition from a later source: a local historian named White, writing in 1892, recorded that a Mr John Loughnane was then living in a house adjoining Boytonrath castle, and remarked, in the slightly breathless phrasing of the period, that it was about the oldest country house he had ever encountered. His evidence was specific: one of the oak collar beams, the horizontal timbers that tie together the rafters of a roof near the apex, bore the carved or inscribed date of 1641. That single date places the structure in the early years of the Confederate Ireland period, built or at least substantially timbered in the same decade that Butler held the land. The Ordnance Survey maps of 1840 and 1900 to 1905 both show a long, narrow building roughly twenty metres south-east of the enclosure surrounding Boytonrath castle, with dimensions suggesting a structure approximately thirty to thirty-five metres in length and six metres in depth. By any measure that is a substantial house for a rural Irish townland of the seventeenth century.