Kilcreen House, Kilcreen, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

House

Kilcreen House, Kilcreen, Co. Kilkenny

Where Kilcreene Orthopaedic Hospital now stands, there was once a house that architectural historians considered one of the more significant late seventeenth-century domestic buildings in Ireland.

It is gone, demolished in the 1950s to make way for the hospital that opened in 1959, but what survives in the record is detailed enough to make the loss feel specific rather than abstract. The U-shaped plan, the high sprocketed roof on a bracket cornice, the screen walls with niches and rusticated arches, the brick chimney stacks with recessed panels, the six-bay garden front with its outer bays breaking forward: these are the particulars of a house that was, by any measure, architecturally ambitious for its time and place.

The Evans family built it after receiving the land as a grant following the Cromwellian confiscations of the mid-seventeenth century, a process by which vast tracts of Irish land were redistributed to soldiers, adventurers, and other settlers loyal to the parliamentary cause. Exactly when construction took place is disputed: the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage suggests around 1675, the historian Carrigan, writing in 1905, placed it at some point before 1708, and O'Kelly, in 1969, gave 1716 as the date. Whatever the precise year, the house that emerged was, as Bence-Jones described it in 1978, a very important late seventeenth-century building, with a single-storey entrance hall, a separate stair room, and chimneypieces of considerable quality, most notably one in grey Kilkenny marble with a scroll pediment. Kilkenny marble, a dark fossiliferous limestone quarried locally and polished to a high sheen, was a prestige material in Irish interiors of this period, and a scroll pediment above a chimneypiece was a mark of serious decorative intent.

Not everything was lost when the house came down. One of the fine late seventeenth-century chimneypieces was removed before demolition and installed in Kilcreen Lodge, which sits roughly 430 metres to the north-east. It is there, built into a later structure, that the most tangible fragment of the original house survives.

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