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

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House

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

There is nothing left to see here, and that is precisely what makes it worth knowing about.

Somewhere in the low-lying wet pasture of Loughanstown in County Limerick, a substantial house once occupied ground that has since returned entirely to grass. No walls, no earthworks, no scatter of stone announces where it stood. The site is identified almost entirely through the convergence of old maps and a single archival note, a building known to history because a surveyor once wrote it down.

The earliest record comes from the Down Survey, the extraordinarily detailed land mapping project carried out in Ireland following the Cromwellian confiscations of the 1650s. The Down Survey barony map of Clanwilliam depicts a substantial house in the townland then recorded as Ballinloghane, and the accompanying terrier, a written description of the lands surveyed, is more specific still. It records that in 1641 Thomas Bourke was the owner of the lands of Ballinloghane, and that upon those lands there "Standes an House." The document is held in the National Library of Ireland as MS 718. Rockstown Castle stands roughly 257 metres to the north-east and a church a little further to the south-east, both still traceable on the ground, which gives some sense of the settled, layered landscape this house once belonged to. The dwelling does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 or the twenty-five-inch edition of 1897, but an outline of a structure does appear on the revised 1923 edition. The Sites and Monuments Record has cautiously suggested this may represent the same location indicated on the Down Survey map, though the building visible in 1923 is likely a post-1700 structure rather than Bourke's original house.

The site sits 17 metres north and 40 metres west of the townland boundary with Rockstown, in level pasture with open views in most directions. An enclosure recorded in the monuments register lies roughly 48 metres to the north-west, so the wider field has archaeological interest beyond the house alone. There is nothing on the surface to look for, but visitors with access to the Down Survey maps online, available through Trinity College Dublin's digital collections, can compare the seventeenth-century depiction with the modern landscape and judge for themselves how closely the two align.

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