House - 16th/17th century, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

House

House – 16th/17th century, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary

Behind a Chinese restaurant on O'Connell Street in what is likely Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, the ivy-clad remains of a 16th or 17th-century townhouse survive on the old quayside, largely unnoticed by the people walking past it every day.

The building sits to the rear of Nos. 31 and 32, west of Collet's Lane, its southern wall facing the river and its western gable so thoroughly overgrown that the stonework beneath is almost entirely obscured. What gives it away as something more than a ruined outbuilding is the quality and ambition of its surviving fabric: walls over a metre thick, sandstone quoins at the corners, a chamfered doorway with a fragment of hood-moulding still in place, and the ghost of a two-light window at first-floor level with the stub of a mullion remaining.

The structure is long and narrow, measuring roughly 17.9 metres by 4.55 metres, and appears to have been a substantial two-storey domestic building. Among its more telling details is an intra-mural garderobe at the east end of the first floor, a small toilet chamber built into the thickness of the wall, with its outlet visible at the base of the exterior face. Eight water spouts, crudely executed but clearly deliberate, survive in the upper courses of the southern wall. Inside, the ground floor seems to have had four vaulted embrasures, and three corbels, the stone brackets that once supported a floor or beam, still project from the south wall at first-floor level. A popular tradition recorded in the 1950s held that the building belonged to a monastic order, but no historical documentation has emerged to support that claim. The western gable, where the worst of the decay and rubbish-burning has occurred, retains just one identifiable feature: the southern jamb of what was once a substantial first-floor fireplace.

The remains are protected under a preservation order, which at least guarantees the surviving masonry some formal recognition, though the condition of the walls, blackened and fractured at the base from years of refuse burning, suggests that recognition and active care are not quite the same thing. The building can be glimpsed from the quayside, though its setting between the rear of commercial premises and the river means it sits in an in-between space, neither publicly presented nor entirely lost.

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Pete F
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