House - 17th century, Ballynamire, Co. Offaly

Co. Offaly |

House

House – 17th century, Ballynamire, Co. Offaly

At the centre of this roofless limestone shell in Ballynamire, County Offaly, a Jacobean chimney stack rises from the middle of the house with a formality that seems almost out of place in what was, by most measures, a modest rural farmhouse.

Three chimneys in total, one on each gable and one at the centre, survive above walls built from uncoursed limestone rubble. That central stack has been noted as closely comparable to the chimney at Grange Castle in County Kildare, which gives some sense of the architectural ambition, or at least the aspirational taste, of whoever commissioned the building.

The farmhouse is rectangular, measuring roughly 17.4 metres east to west and just under 7 metres north to south, with walls around 0.7 metres thick. The ground floor was divided into two rooms by a central fireplace, with a doorway in the south wall aligned directly opposite it. A second doorway in the north wall was later converted into a window, a small alteration that hints at changing use over time. The fireplaces on the gable ends are positioned at first-floor level, carried originally on timber beams; the sockets or supports for those beams are still legible in the masonry of both gable walls. The first floor and roof are now gone. The east room retains windows on both its south and north walls at ground level, while the west end of the building is more poorly preserved. The house almost certainly dates to the first half of the seventeenth century, and the proximity of Ballycowan Castle, built in 1626 by the Harbert family and lying just to the south, suggests the farmhouse may have been part of the same building campaign, a domestic adjunct to a fortified tower house of the kind common across the Irish midlands during the early plantation period.

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