Maginstown House, Maginstown, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

House

Maginstown House, Maginstown, Co. Tipperary

At the broad, flat crest of a Tipperary hill, a farmhouse quietly contains within its eastern end the remains of a windmill, absorbed so thoroughly into the building's fabric that the two now function as a single structure.

It is still inhabited, which makes the arrangement all the more curious: a working home that has simply grown around the ruins of an old mill rather than clearing them away.

The history of the site reaches back at least to the mid-seventeenth century. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a Cromwellian-era land assessment that recorded ownership and conditions across Ireland, notes 'an old Thatcht house with a ruined Wind Mill' on the land of 'Edmond Mocler of Maganstowne Irish Papist'. That phrasing, Irish Papist, was the survey's standard designation for Catholic landowners at a moment when such ownership was under severe political pressure. The house recorded then was in poor repair, and the mill was already ruined. What survives today is almost certainly that same structure, substantially modified over the centuries. When the roof was re-slated in recent years, the original roof timbers were found in sound condition and left in place, and traces of the old thatch were still visible beneath. The building has been raised in height by roughly a metre since its earliest form, and the irregularly coursed rubble of the west gable, only partially rendered, shows clearly where brick was added to the upper portion during that heightening. Several interior changes also hint at the building's long evolution: what is now the front door appears originally to have been a window, its internally splaying embrasure suggesting a later conversion, and both a rear window and a west gable doorway have been blocked up at some point. The four rooms running east to west each open into one another through doorways set at the south end of each partition wall, giving the interior an unusual, sequential logic that feels more medieval in arrangement than Georgian.

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Pete F
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