House - medieval, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

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House

House – medieval, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

Medieval Dublin was largely a city of timber and daub, which makes the occasional stone house all the more worth pausing over.

Somewhere near the Pool Gate, one such building existed in 1482, substantial enough to be noted but now entirely vanished from the streetscape and from any map that might pin it down with confidence.

The sole record of this structure comes from Clarke (2002, 30), who mentions its former existence near the Pool Gate, one of the entry points in the walled circuit of late medieval Dublin. Stone domestic buildings of this period were uncommon enough in Irish urban contexts that their appearance in the documentary record tends to reflect either the wealth of an owner or a deliberate investment in permanence and security. Unfortunately, Clarke's reference yields no owner, no dimensions, and no further architectural detail. The building is noted, briefly, and that is all that survives of it.

Because the structure has not been precisely located, there is no site to visit in any conventional sense. The general area around the historic southern wall of medieval Dublin is accessible, and the broad geography of where the Pool Gate once stood can be traced against modern maps of the south city, but nothing above ground connects directly to this particular building. For anyone interested in the archaeology of medieval Dublin, the record serves more as a reminder of how much has been lost to later development than as a pointer towards something visible. The city's medieval fabric was extensively disturbed from the seventeenth century onwards, and stone houses of this kind left little trace once they were dismantled or built over.

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Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
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Ref: DU02826

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