House - medieval, Cashel, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

House

House – medieval, Cashel, Co. Tipperary

Tucked into the fabric of a Cashel streetscape, a single wall is doing a remarkable amount of quiet work.

What looks, at a glance, like the back end of a Georgian terrace is actually carrying within it a fragment of a medieval town house, at least three storeys tall in its original form, built from roughly coursed limestone rubble. Only 4.2 metres of the south-west wall survives, absorbed into the north-east gable of Bank Place and doubling as the yard wall of 1 Canopy St, but that sliver of masonry holds enough detail to reconstruct the outline of a substantial urban dwelling.

The surviving wall reads almost like a cross-section through the building's former life. At ground level, a small wall-cupboard, less than a metre wide and set into what is now a modern kitchen extension, hints at the domestic routines of whoever once occupied the space. Nearby, a blocked opening with cut limestone surrounds is most likely a window embrasure, a recessed window opening with a slight inward splay, and the depressed arch above it, formed from wedge-shaped voussoir stones, sits noticeably recessed into the wall face. A shallow offset running horizontally at that level may once have supported a timber floor, though there is also some indication that a vault, a curved stone ceiling of the kind common in medieval Irish town houses, may originally have sprung from the wall just above the embrasure. At first-floor level, a crudely blocked doorway with broken limestone surrounds survives, its modest width suggesting an internal rather than external opening. Higher still, two limestone corbels, stone brackets projecting from the wall face and finished with margin tooling and punch-dressing, once carried the wooden floor of the third storey. Above them, a slight offset with what appears to be a band of thin coping stones probably marks the original wall-head, with a further stretch of masonry above that likely added later, in connection with the construction of the neighbouring 9 Bank Place.

Cashel is best known for the extraordinary complex of ecclesiastical buildings crowning its rock above the town, but medieval Cashel was also a functioning urban settlement, and this fragment is a rare trace of its domestic architecture. Most of the town's medieval building stock has long since been demolished, absorbed, or built over beyond recognition, which makes this incorporated wall, still legible in its detail despite centuries of adaptation, an unusually informative survival.

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