House - 16th/17th century, Derrin, Co. Laois

Co. Laois |

House

House – 16th/17th century, Derrin, Co. Laois

In the gently undulating countryside of County Laois, a three-storey rubble limestone shell stands in a state of quiet desertion, its last known occupant having died nearly three and a half centuries ago.

The building is not a castle, not a tower house in the classic Irish sense, but something more domestic and architecturally specific: a T-plan house of the early seventeenth century, a form that signals a transitional moment in Irish vernacular architecture, when the priorities of defence were giving way, however cautiously, to those of comfort and household life.

The structure measures 11.2 metres along its north-south axis and is built to three storeys in roughly coursed rubble limestone. Its plan takes a T-shape from the projecting stair tower set into the centre of the west wall, a practical arrangement that kept the main circulation separate from the principal rooms. The main doorway opened from the east, and the interior was heated by fireplaces on multiple levels: two floors in the south wall, three in the north. Tall diagonal chimney stacks rise from both the north and south gables, a detail that would have made the building a visible presence in the landscape even at a distance. The windows are large and flat-headed with a splayed reveal, a design that drew in more light than the narrow loops of an earlier generation of buildings, and one that Maurice Craig noted in his survey of Irish architecture published in 1982. According to the historian Carrigan, writing in 1905, the last occupant of the house was traditionally believed to be a woman named Dorothy Hedges, who died in 1675. After that, the building appears to have slipped out of use, and the countryside grew quietly around it.

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