House - 16th/17th century, Corballis (Nethercross By.), Co. Dublin

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House – 16th/17th century, Corballis (Nethercross By.), Co. Dublin

Somewhere beneath the plasterwork of this two-storey house on the north shore of the Malahide estuary, an ornamented window is quietly waiting.

During refurbishments, the owner uncovered it in the west end of the north wall, only for it to be plastered over again. Stone mullions, the vertical dividing elements of a period window frame, were also found in the grounds. The irregular arrangement of windows visible on the exterior suggests the building did not go up all at once, but accumulated, layer by layer, over time.

The house at Corballis, in the old barony of Nethercross, appears in two mid-seventeenth-century surveys conducted within a year or two of each other. The Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, a vast cartographic project commissioned under Cromwellian administration to map forfeited Irish lands, marks a dwelling at this location. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, which recorded landholdings in written form, describes a slated house at Corballis, a detail noted by Simington in 1945. That a house was slated at this date was not unremarkable; it indicated a degree of permanence and means. The rectangular plan and the surviving evidence of multiple building phases suggest the structure has older roots, possibly stretching back into the sixteenth century, though the precise sequence is difficult to untangle.

The building sits close to the Malahide estuary, and one of the outbuildings running to the south retains the remains of a stairwell, a quiet trace of a more elaborate domestic arrangement than the structure's current appearance might suggest. The site is not a public monument, and access is not guaranteed, so the house is best appreciated as part of a broader awareness of the estuary's layered past rather than as a destination in itself. Those with an interest in early modern domestic architecture in County Dublin will find the Corballis house a useful reminder that significant fabric can survive in unexpected and unremarked places, sometimes literally concealed behind a coat of plaster.

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