House - 18th/19th century, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
House
At the corner where Castle Street meets Werburgh Street in Dublin's old city, there is nothing to suggest that one of the more unusual building types in Irish urban history once occupied the spot.
No plaque, no outline in the pavement, no photographic record. The site has been absorbed entirely into the fabric of a city that has never been especially sentimental about its older fabric.
What stood here, until its demolition in 1812, was a cagework house. Cagework is a form of timber-framed construction in which the structural skeleton of the building, typically heavy upright posts and horizontal beams, is left exposed on the exterior, with the spaces between filled in with plaster, brick, or wattle. It was common in medieval and early modern towns across Britain and Ireland, and its survival into the nineteenth century was already something of an anachronism. The architectural historian Walsh, writing in 1973 and drawing on earlier sources, records this particular example at pages 59 and 73 of his study, noting both its location and the year it came down. By 1812, such structures were considered obsolete at best and a fire hazard at worst; many Irish towns had been quietly clearing them for decades. That this one lasted as long as it did, on a prominent corner close to Dublin Castle, is itself a small curiosity.
There is, bluntly, nothing to see. The address sits in a part of the south city that has been built over and rebuilt repeatedly, and no surface trace of the cagework house survives. A visit to the corner of Castle Street and Werburgh Street is worthwhile only for those interested in thinking about urban absence, in standing on ground where something once existed and leaving with nothing more than the fact of it. Werburgh Street itself has its own layered history, and St Werburgh's Church nearby is worth the detour. But anyone hoping for a physical remnant of the cagework house will find only a gap in the record, which is sometimes the most honest thing a historical site can offer.