House - 17th century, Ballina, Co. Galway

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House

House – 17th century, Ballina, Co. Galway

What survives of this late seventeenth or eighteenth-century house in Ballina, County Galway is just enough to suggest what has been lost.

A single gable wall at the north-east end still stands, capped by a rectangular chimney, with short stubs of the south-east and north-west side-walls returning from it. Everything else is gone, or close enough to gone as makes no difference.

The building was once a substantial two-storey rectangular structure, oriented north-east to south-west, measuring around 21 metres long and 9 metres wide. The upper storey sat within the pitch of the roof rather than rising above it as a full second floor, a common arrangement in domestic buildings of this period that kept construction costs down while still providing usable upper space. The ground floor held two fireplaces, now robbed out, meaning their stone and dressed material was stripped away for reuse elsewhere, a fate that overtook countless rural buildings across Ireland as later generations treated older structures as convenient quarries. Two wall recesses survive at ground level as well, likely used for storage or the housing of small objects. A third fireplace occupied the first floor, with four rectangular windows arranged around it. The house stands roughly 90 metres north-north-east of a castle, suggesting it formed part of a modest estate complex, the residence sitting at a short remove from an older fortified structure as was typical of the period when plantation-era defensiveness was giving way to something a little closer to ordinary domestic life.

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Pete F
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