House - medieval, Fethard, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
House
On the south side of Fethard's Main Street, roughly at its midpoint, a building currently occupied at street level by the Post Office conceals considerably older fabric behind its ordinary façade.
The ground here slopes away steadily towards the Clashawley River, and it is that topography which holds part of the key to understanding the structure: what reads today as a basement was in all likelihood the original ground floor, entered from the rear of the building rather than from the street. The present street line has crept forward over the centuries, leaving the older building recessed behind it.
The structure is a five-bay, two-storey house over that semi-buried lower floor, with walls 0.8 metres thick, a measurement consistent with late medieval construction. Each gable carries a chimney stack, and angle fireplaces, a feature associated with the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, appear in the south-west corner on all three floor levels. At basement level, one of these fireplaces sits beside a splayed recess in the south wall, roughly a metre high and narrower than it is tall, which may originally have been a loop, the kind of narrow defensive or ventilation opening common in medieval stonework. Several other windows at basement level have been blocked up over time. Taken together, the wall thickness, the building line, and the general arrangement link it closely to another medieval house immediately to its east, a relationship noted by the architectural historian T. O'Keeffe in 1995. Both buildings share the same recessed alignment relative to the modern street, suggesting they belong to the same phase of the town's development.
Fethard is one of the best-preserved medieval towns in Ireland, and its Main Street still carries traces of its late medieval layout beneath later alterations and shopfronts. The building is easy to miss precisely because it functions so normally; the Post Office extension along the ground-floor façade gives it a thoroughly unremarkable appearance from the pavement. Knowing that the floor below is where people once entered, and that the walls around them are possibly six centuries old, reframes the whole street.