House - 16th/17th century, Fethard, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
House
On the west side of Watergate Street in Fethard, a three-storey limestone building presents a fairly ordinary Victorian streetscape to passing traffic.
The blocked doorways and infilled vehicular entrance on the ground floor give little away. But the fabric of the building behind that nineteenth-century facing tells a considerably older story, layered up across several centuries and still legible in crease lines, corbels, and carved stonework if you know where to look.
The structure began as a single-storey building attached to the south side of Fethard Castle, its original roofline still faintly traceable in coping stones embedded in the castle wall and a corresponding mark on the south gable. Sometime in the early seventeenth century the building was raised to two storeys, and it was during this phase that the house acquired its most distinctive features. The main entrance was placed at first-floor level, a round-headed doorway with chamfered surround and punch-tooled dressing set into the west wall, oriented towards the medieval parish church and graveyard across the way. A projecting corbel below and to the side of this doorway likely anchored a timber external stair, since removed. The ground floor at this period had no direct street-level access and would have been reached by ladder or internal stair from above, a defensive or simply practical arrangement common in the period. Also dating to this early seventeenth-century phase is the large stone chimney projecting from the west wall, nearly three and a half metres wide. Inside, the first floor retains a limestone fireplace whose jambs are decorated with carved strapwork, a decorative style datable on stylistic grounds to around 1610 to 1620. In the latter half of the nineteenth century a third floor was added, the building was re-fenestrated with a three-bay front facing the street, and a shop-front cornice was installed above a wide vehicular entrance, both subsequently blocked. A doorway set into the rear boundary wall, with a depressed three-centred arch and chamfered surround, dates to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and once gave private access directly into the churchyard. The house sits within a dense cluster of medieval and early modern fabric: Edmond's Castle lies within the same courtyard to the southwest, and another possible house of similar date survives to the south.