House - 17th/18th century, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

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House

House – 17th/18th century, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

Somewhere in Dublin's south city, a mid-terrace house that reads from the outside as unremarkable Georgian streetscape is concealing something considerably older behind its facade.

Built around 1665, according to a 2012 survey by the Dublin Civic Trust, the structure predates most of what surrounds it by the better part of a century, and the fabric inside tells a story the exterior keeps quiet.

The building is three storeys over a part basement, four bays wide on a plot of roughly ten metres, with a front parapet that has lost its original dormer roof, bringing it closer in profile to the Georgian terraces that eventually grew up around it. But inside, the bones of a 17th-century mansion remain. The walls and floors are timber-framed, with exposed beams still visible, and the large chimneys are arranged along the central spine wall, a structural arrangement typical of substantial domestic building in the later 1600s. Surveyors also recorded remains of plaster, panelling, and a cornice around the chimney stack, along with what the Dublin Civic Trust described in 2012 as a rare example of a 17th-century staircase. That last detail is worth pausing on: intact staircases from this period are genuinely uncommon survivors in an Irish urban context, where successive waves of subdivision, modernisation, and neglect have stripped most comparable interiors bare. The notes were recorded by P. Walsh in December 2012.

Because this is a mid-terrace property in a residential and commercial part of the south city, the interior is not publicly accessible in the ordinary way. The exterior gives little away beyond the proportions of the plot and the parapet line, though the four-bay width is slightly broader than the standard Georgian bay, a subtle indicator that something earlier lies beneath the later finish. Anyone with a serious interest in Dublin's pre-Georgian built fabric would find the Dublin Civic Trust's survey records a useful starting point for understanding what survives here and in a handful of comparable structures across the old city.

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