House - 16th/17th century, Dublin North City, Co. Dublin

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House

House – 16th/17th century, Dublin North City, Co. Dublin

Somewhere beneath a north Dublin housing estate lies the footprint of a house that once had nine chimneys.

That detail, recorded in the Hearth Money Rolls of 1664, is one of the few vivid clues that survive about a substantial residence at Little Cabra, a place that has otherwise been almost entirely erased from the visible landscape. The Hearth Money Rolls were a form of taxation introduced in Ireland in the 1660s, levied per fireplace, and a house with nine chimneys would have been a considerable establishment for the period, well above the modest rural norm.

The Seagrave family were already at Little Cabra before 1619, and the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 noted one stone house in good repair with outbuildings on the site. The Hearth Money record of 1664 places them there firmly, and they remained associated with the property into the following century. In the early 1700s, a John Seagrave rebuilt on the same ground, and it is this later structure that was probably known as Cabragh House, a three-storey building of early eighteenth-century appearance that still appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837. The sequence is a fairly common one in the Dublin hinterland: a late medieval or early modern gentry residence, rebuilt or remodelled in the Georgian period, and carrying the memory of an older occupation in its bones even as its outward form changed.

Today there is no visible surface trace. The site is occupied by a housing estate, and nothing of the house, its outbuildings, or its grounds remains above ground. The 1837 OS map is the most useful reference for anyone wanting to orient themselves, giving a sense of where Cabragh House stood relative to roads and field boundaries that have since been absorbed into the suburban grid. The interest here is less in visiting than in reading the landscape against the documentary record, piecing together what a nine-chimneyed house in a mid-seventeenth-century survey actually looked like, who occupied it, and how completely a place of some local significance can disappear within a few generations of development.

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