House - 16th century, Ballyconor Big, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
House
What survives of this late sixteenth-century house in Ballyconor Big amounts to little more than a single storey of masonry, yet even in that reduced state it preserves details that reward a close look.
One window opening, originally fitted with four ogee-headed lights, still punctuates the west wall; the ogee, a double-curved profile borrowed from Gothic stonework, was a fashionable choice for domestic architecture in this period. Beside it, a doorway and a single musket-loop remain in place, the mullions of the window long since removed. The north gable retains a blocked chimney-breast nearly three and a half metres wide, suggesting a substantial hearth that once served a building measuring roughly sixteen and a half metres north to south and six metres across internally.
A Latin inscription on a memorial stone, now lost, recorded that the house was built in 1570 by Dionisius Stafford and his second wife Katherine Synnott of Ballygerry. Stafford had previously been married to Joan Browne of Mulrankin, a detail that places the family within the web of Anglo-Norman landed families who had shaped County Wexford since the medieval period. The house was built against the north side of an earlier tower house, and together the two structures may have formed part of a bawn, the walled enclosure commonly attached to tower houses for the protection of livestock and household. The arrangement points to a moment of transition, when a fortified medieval residence was being extended into something more domestically ambitious, if still defensively minded. The house itself was largely demolished around 1860, leaving the west wall and north gable as the only legible fragments of what had been a significant mid-Tudor dwelling.