House - 17th century, Farranrory, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
House
Pressed up against the western wall of a medieval tower house in the uplands of County Tipperary, a ruined two-storey farmhouse offers an unusually legible record of how one building generation absorbed and repurposed another.
The tower house's original doorway was blocked up, a narrow slit opening inserted in its place, and what had been the guardroom was quietly converted into an internal passage linking the old structure to the new. A fireplace was cut into the exterior face of the tower house's western wall to serve the farmhouse's ground-floor room. It is the kind of pragmatic, incremental architecture that rarely survives clearly enough to read, and here it survives well enough to follow the logic almost room by room.
The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 records that in 1640 the property belonged to a William Faninge, and describes it as a good little castle with a good thatched house and some cabins. The farmhouse attached to the tower house may well be that thatched house, substantially rebuilt in the following decades. By the 19th century a single-room extension had been added onto the western gable, and what appear to be reused architectural fragments, possibly salvaged from the tower house itself, were incorporated into the southern wall. The dwelling is oriented east to west, its front facing south, with four bays across a two-storey facade lighting three rooms. The northern wall has collapsed almost entirely to low footings, but the southern wall survives in places to roof level, as does the western gable. Fireplaces survive at either end of the house. There is no trace of the cabins the Civil Survey mentioned alongside the castle and the house.
The site sits on a low rise of grassland in wet, poorly drained upland terrain, with a stream roughly 60 metres to the north. At the time of survey, wrapped silage bales were stacked against the southern face of the farmhouse, making close inspection of the wall difficult. The ruinous state of the windows and the partially destroyed doorway mean much of the finer detail of the house has been lost, but the broad structural sequence, medieval tower, attached 17th-century farmhouse, 19th-century extension, remains legible to anyone willing to walk around the building carefully.