House - 16th/17th century, Gardens, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
House
Behind the shopfront of a jeweller's on Kilkenny's High Street, the south gable of number 71 quietly holds something far older than the 19th-century building that surrounds it.
Embedded within what is now a commercial premises trading as G.L. Ryan, Jeweller, is a gable and chimney stack dating to the late 16th or mid-17th century, the remnants of an earlier house that was absorbed rather than demolished as the street was rebuilt and refaced over successive generations. It is the kind of survival that goes unnoticed from the pavement: a fragment of Kilkenny's early modern domestic fabric folded inside a Victorian facade.
The structural evidence was noted by Farrelly and colleagues in 1993, but the ground beneath the site has its own story. Excavations carried out by archaeologist Sheila Lane in the area between the rear of number 71 and the western frontage of Kieran Street uncovered a circular stone-lined well with an internal diameter of one metre, along with approximately one and a half metres of stratified deposits representing medieval and post-medieval reclamation and make-up dumps. These kinds of deposits, layers of material deliberately laid down to raise or consolidate ground levels over time, often preserve the clearest evidence of how urban plots were gradually built up, extended, and adapted across centuries. The well itself suggests domestic or commercial use stretching back well into the medieval period, long before the surviving gable was constructed.
