House - 17th century, Morgans North, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
House
What you find at Morgans North in County Limerick is not one building but several moments of construction folded into a single structure, all of it sitting directly on top of something much older.
The two-storey house known as Morgan's House occupies the south-western corner of a medieval castle and its bawn, the term for the defensive walled enclosure that typically surrounded an Irish tower house. The result is a layered site where a post-Cromwellian domestic residence has grown out of, and over, a fortified medieval complex, its T-shaped plan sprawling in a way that reflects decades of addition rather than any single moment of design.
The building's oldest section, the south-eastern block, has been dated by the architectural historian Roelof Ffolliott to around 1650 to 1670. Within that block, the north-eastern portion is thought to be the earliest part of all, identifiable by its central panelled chimney stack. The longer arm of the T, running to the north-west, came later; Ffolliott places it in the late seventeenth century and notes its low ceilings and a much-worn staircase, both consistent with the period. That north-western wing is only one room thick and has irregular fenestration, with the larger windows placed at first-floor level rather than ground level, which was not unusual in an era when security and status were both expressed through architecture. According to de Breffny and Ffolliott, the house, or at least part of it, was built by Thomas Rose, who served as Sheriff of Limerick in 1674, a detail that places the construction firmly in the period of post-Restoration settlement in Munster.
The house is recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps and holds a National Inventory of Architectural Heritage registration. Immediately to the north-west, ranges of farm buildings in various states of ruin suggest the site continued in agricultural use well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Visitors approaching the area should be prepared for a working rural landscape rather than a managed heritage site; the medieval and post-medieval remains here sit within the ordinary fabric of the County Limerick countryside. The underlying castle and bawn are recorded separately in the archaeological record, and looking carefully at the ground-level masonry around the house gives some sense of how the later domestic structure has made use of, and grown around, those earlier fortified foundations.