House - 18th/19th century, Mocurry, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

House

House – 18th/19th century, Mocurry, Co. Wexford

A single wall standing nearly five metres high on a west-facing ridge in County Wexford is, on the face of it, an unremarkable ruin.

What makes this one worth pausing over is what lies beneath and around it. The surviving masonry, roughly 9.8 metres long and 0.6 metres thick, with a doorway flanked by narrow windows and a granite string course running along the top of the south face, is almost certainly a remnant of a structure known as Duffry Hall. It was built not on open ground but directly onto the outer edge of a much older circular moated site, a form of enclosed medieval settlement in which a ditch and raised bank, sometimes water-filled, demarcated a residence or farmstead. That earlier moat has been largely filled in to the east and south-south-west, partly as a consequence of the later building pressing against it.

The relationship between the two features is the quietly strange part. Whoever commissioned Duffry Hall, probably in the eighteenth century, chose to set it against the curve of a medieval earthwork rather than ignore it, and in doing so altered the moated site permanently. The Urrin River runs roughly 300 metres to the west along the same north-south corridor as the ridge, which suggests this elevated, river-adjacent position had been considered a worthwhile place to settle across several centuries. The granite string course, a horizontal band of projecting stone used decoratively and to shed rainwater, is one of the few details that points to the building having had some architectural pretension, even if what remains is a single orphaned wall.

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