Kilmore, Kilmore, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
House
In the flat terrain of County Tipperary, a plywood manufacturing plant backs up against a wall that once enclosed an entirely different world.
The southern boundary wall of a long-vanished T-plan house called Kilmore, first recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, now serves as the rear wall of an industrial unit, its original stonework heightened with concrete blocks. A curving wall to the west of where the house stood also survives, tracing the outline of what was once a formal house complex. These fragments are easy to overlook, but they are, materially speaking, about all that remains.
The story of Kilmore is a tangle of competing possibilities. According to a nineteenth-century source cited by the historian Mullally in 1862 to 1863, the house may have been built in the mid-eighteenth century for the daughter of Ellen Meagher and Robert Jolly, on the occasion of her marriage to a Counsellor Meagher of Kilmore. The landowner, however, believed the original house stood not on the later OS-mapped site at all, but in a farm complex further to the west. That alternative structure is largely demolished too, its remains now being absorbed into a present-day farmhouse that also incorporates what appears to be an eighteenth-century coach house. Examining what survives of that ruinous western building, there is nothing to indicate it dates to the seventeenth century, as some may have assumed. The question of which structure came first, and which family built it, remains unresolved.