Millbrook House, Rossacrow, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

House

Millbrook House, Rossacrow, Co. Tipperary

A house with an egg-shaped thatched roof is an unusual enough feature to lodge in the memory, and the fact that two separate sources, centuries apart, independently record something of the kind at this Tipperary site makes it worth pausing over.

Where a modern bungalow now stands on elevated ground near Rossacrow, there once existed a dwelling whose roof was described by the last people to see it standing as oval or egg-shaped in profile. The house was pulled down in the 1940s, living just long enough to be remembered by local landowners but not long enough to be photographed in any detail that has so far come to light.

What makes the oval roof more than a curiosity is its appearance in two distinct historical records. The Down Survey, a massive mapping project carried out between 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty to quantify land available for redistribution after the Cromwellian conquest, depicts the building with a dome-shaped roof. The Civil Survey, a parallel Cromwellian-era document recording landholders and their properties, lists it as one of three thatched houses in the area. The convergence of these two mid-seventeenth-century sources with the twentieth-century oral account from the landowner suggests the roofline was genuinely distinctive and not simply a draughtsman's shorthand. The site itself sits on high ground with views in all directions, overlooking a mill and bridge to the south, which would have made it a notable feature in the local landscape.

Nothing of the house itself survives above ground. The only physical remnant associated with it is part of a walled garden, the kind of enclosed kitchen or ornamental garden common to houses of modest gentry status, though its walls have been absorbed into agricultural buildings and survive only in fragments. The site is now entirely domestic in appearance, its unusual architectural history preserved only in old maps and the recollection of those who saw the final years of the building it replaced.

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