House - medieval, Limerick City, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
House
Tucked into a narrow lane between George's Quay and Court House Lane in Limerick City, a fragment of medieval wall survives in conditions that make it easy to miss and easier still to misread.
The wall, roughly three metres long and six metres high, preserves a blocked doorway with a segmental arch at ground level, the arch being one in which the curve is shallower than a semicircle, common in later medieval construction. At the southern end, a row of dressed limestone quoins may mark the jamb of a former window. The masonry is roughly coursed rubble limestone, the kind of workaday construction that housed merchants and townspeople rather than institutions, which makes it all the more interesting that this particular fragment generated a small but instructive piece of antiquarian confusion.
The wall is catalogued as House G in the Urban Survey of Limerick, compiled by Bradley and others in 1989. The surveyors were working partly from earlier fieldwork by Thomas Johnson Westropp, who had noted "fragments of medieval walls, with windows" at this location in a paper published in 1904 to 1905. Westropp, a prolific recorder of Irish antiquities, made one notable error here: he identified the structure as part of an Augustinian monastery. The 1989 survey corrected this, concluding that the remains belong to a medieval townhouse rather than any religious foundation. The wall in question forms the south-east angle of the yard belonging to the Gerald Griffin Memorial School on Bridge Street, a Christian Brothers school built on the site. The internal face of the wall is plastered over, concealing whatever features may lie beneath, while the south face, forming the rear wall of a premises on George's Quay, is obscured by ivy and yields nothing to the eye.
The only readable section is that east-facing fragment visible from the lane. Visitors approaching from George's Quay should look for the narrow passage heading north towards Court House Lane; the wall stands on the right-hand side. There is no signage and no formal access point, so what can be seen is limited to what is visible from the lane itself. The ivy and plaster that cover the other faces mean this eastern elevation is genuinely the only opportunity to observe the medieval fabric directly. The blocked doorway and the limestone quoins are the details worth pausing over, modest survivors of a medieval streetscape that the city has largely built over and moved on from.