House - 17th century

The National Monuments Service's description

Located in undulating pastureland on a gradual W-facing slope. A map drawn in 1658 shows the tower house and bawn (TN017-009001/002)) at Ballynakill and a later gabled house (Stout 1984, 125; Cunningham 1976, 70). Most of the SE gable (5.5m L) and the S end of SW wall (t 0.62m) of a seventeenth-century house still survives and may be the house depicted on the 1658 map. It is a sandstone rubble-built building, randomly coursed. The gable has a steep roof profile and a large stout chimney which projected out beyond the gable. This gable was incorporated into a later eighteenth-century house, at which stage new floors were inserted to provide three storeys with attic. The seventeenth-century house extended NW (17.3m L) probably abutting the SE wall of the tower house. A second pile was added in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century onto the SW wall of this house - it also has a large projecting chimney on its SE gable. In the final phase of building, in the eighteenth century, a later house was built which incorporated the two-pile house and earlier tower house to form a H-plan house. This later house is ornamented with ovals and lozenges in the 'artisan-mannerist' style (Craig 1982, 109). The SE block of the eighteenth-century house has five bays and two storeys with a blank parapet. The main façade to the SE has long rectangular windows and the central ope appears to be a doorway. The central block of the eighteenth-century house was three storeys high.

The above description is derived from 'The Archaeological Inventory of County Tipperary. Vol. 1 - North Tipperary' compiled by Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien (Dublin: Stationery Office, 2002). In certain instances the entries have been revised and updated in the light of recent research.

Date of upload/revision: 22 September 2008