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

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House

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

A single dwelling, quietly recorded on a military survey and then largely forgotten by history, is among the more tantalising fragments of early modern Dublin's south city.

What we know of it amounts to almost nothing, and yet that near-absence is itself telling. The building's survival in any historical record at all is owed not to its own significance but to the methodical eye of a cartographer working in the service of the Crown, capturing a cityscape that was already beginning to change beyond recognition.

The sole surviving evidence for this structure is its appearance on Bernard de Gomme's map of 1673, which shows a dwelling situated near Burgh Quay, on the south bank of the Liffey. De Gomme was a military engineer of Dutch origin who served Charles II, and his detailed survey of Dublin is one of the most valuable cartographic documents of the period, recording the city's layout at a moment when post-Restoration development was beginning to reshape its medieval and Tudor fabric. A dwelling marked near Burgh Quay in 1673 would have stood in a part of the city still transitioning from its older, more irregular character, close to the river and the commercial activity that centred on it. Whether the structure dated to the sixteenth or early seventeenth century is not specified in the record, but the dating range suggests a building already some decades old by the time de Gomme sketched it.

There is nothing to see on the ground today, and no physical trace of this particular structure has been identified. The Burgh Quay area has been heavily redeveloped across successive centuries, and the quayside itself was considerably altered as Dublin's riverfront was formalised and extended. For anyone interested in this period of the city's history, de Gomme's 1673 map is accessible through the collections of institutions such as the National Library of Ireland, and repays close attention as a document of how the city looked before Georgian planning transformed its core. The map itself is the site, in a sense; the dwelling exists now only as a mark on paper, a small proof that something stood there once.

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Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
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Ref: DU03545

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