Building, Finglas, Co. Dublin

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Utility Structures

Building, Finglas, Co. Dublin

Finglas today reads as north Dublin suburbia, a landscape of housing estates and retail parks that makes it easy to forget the area's longer agricultural past.

Yet the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a remarkable Cromwellian-era document compiled to catalogue land ownership and value across Ireland in the aftermath of the wars of the 1640s, records farm buildings standing within the parish of Finglas, offering a rare textual snapshot of a working rural community on the edge of what was then a much smaller city.

The Civil Survey, edited by R. C. Simington and published in 1945, was produced by the Cromwellian administration partly to facilitate the redistribution of confiscated Irish lands to soldiers and settlers. Its surveyors moved parish by parish, noting landowners, acreages, and the presence of structures. The mention of farm buildings in Finglas, recorded at pages 140 to 141 of Simington's edition, is brief, but it anchors the parish firmly within a functioning agricultural economy at mid-seventeenth century. Finglas itself had long been a place of some significance, sitting on the River Tolka and close enough to Dublin to serve as a supply parish, and the presence of farm infrastructure fits that pattern of productive land on the city's doorstep.

Because the surviving evidence for this particular site amounts to a single documentary reference, there is no structure to visit and no physical remains currently identified above ground. The value here is archival rather than architectural. Researchers interested in early modern Finglas would do well to consult Simington's edition of the Civil Survey directly, held in major Irish libraries including the National Library of Ireland. The survey as a whole is a surprisingly readable source, its terse entries occasionally giving way to details about mills, castles, and orchards that bring the mid-seventeenth-century landscape briefly into focus.

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Finglas, Co. Dublin
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