House - 17th/18th century, Benjerstown, Co. Meath

Co. Meath |

House

House – 17th/18th century, Benjerstown, Co. Meath

By the time anyone thought to measure it carefully, the two-storey house at Benjerstown in County Meath was already well on its way to becoming a ruin, its walls reduced to little more than a metre in height during clearance work in July 1991.

What survives, or survived to be recorded, is a remarkably legible structure: a rectangular block measuring roughly 15.5 metres north to south and 6.75 metres east to west, with six tall window openings and a single doorway along the east-facing wall, a partly blocked doorway on the west, and a small return wing projecting westward from the centre. The joists for the first floor were set directly into the long walls, a modest but telling detail about how the building was put together, and round-backed fireplaces with some brick survive in the north and south ground-floor rooms. The upper floor had three rooms but no fireplaces, suggesting it was used for sleeping rather than daily life.

The townland's history stretches back further than the house itself. The Civil Survey of 1655 records that in 1640 a man named Walter Evers held 172 acres at what it calls Bingerstown, along with a stone house and a mill, both described at that date as wasted, meaning ruined or derelict. The present structure is thought to post-date that earlier building, probably erected in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. By 1793 it appears on Taylor and Skinner's map of the roads of Ireland in the ownership of a family called Adams. The 1836 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it still roofed. By the time of Griffith's Valuation, the mid-nineteenth century property survey that catalogued landholdings across Ireland, a Patrick McGuinness was leasing the house from one James Shiels, who was himself a leaseholder under Eliza Adams. Eliza, who owned roughly half the townland, lived in a separate house about 150 metres to the east; that building has since disappeared entirely, leaving the Benjerstown house as the last physical trace of the Adams family's presence in the area.

The site sits in low-lying ground approximately 400 metres west of Siddan church, a useful landmark for anyone trying to locate it. The walls, reduced as they are, still define the plan of the house clearly enough that the original arrangement of rooms and openings can be read on the ground.

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