House - 16th/17th century, Kilmallock, Co. Limerick

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House

House – 16th/17th century, Kilmallock, Co. Limerick

On Sarsfield Street in Kilmallock, a limestone mantlepiece and a pair of side walls are about all that survive of what was once one of the more architecturally accomplished townhouses in a medieval Co. Limerick settlement.

The building known as Sarsfield's House was partly demolished around 1930, and a cinema was eventually built on the site. What makes it worth pausing over is not just what was lost, but how close it came to going completely unrecorded. Many of the 17th-century structures along the same street have been plastered or cemented over, their original features obscured, and the Urban Survey of County Limerick notes with some regret that diagnostic identifying details are not always immediately recognisable beneath those later coatings.

Before it was substantially demolished, Sarsfield's House was a three-floored, three-bayed structure of limestone masonry, with rectangular windows featuring transoms and mullions, those being the horizontal and vertical dividing bars characteristic of late 16th and 17th-century vernacular architecture, and rectangular hood mouldings over the openings. The doorway carried a segmental arch with its own hood-mould, and the gable wall held cut stone fireplaces. A painting by Thomas Mulvaney, now held in the National Gallery of Ireland, shows the house and several of its neighbours before they were plastered over, preserving something of the streetscape that is otherwise almost entirely gone. As for the name, Lee (1965) linked it to a Sarsfield who held the title Viscount Kilmallock, a claim traced back to Croker's 1824 account, though Leeson's list of British peerage titles does not appear to include that particular viscountcy, leaving the attribution somewhat uncertain.

What remains on the site today is fragmentary: three chimneys, the side walls, and a limestone mantlepiece. The street itself, Sarsfield Street, is the place to orient yourself, and a familiarity with the Mulvaney painting beforehand gives the surviving fragments considerably more context. Kilmallock is well worth exploring on foot in any case, given its Dominican friary, its town walls, and the other plastered-over structures along the same street that the Urban Survey suggests are almost certainly of the same period, their original stonework quietly intact beneath the render.

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