Barn, Richmond, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Farm Buildings
Some historic structures survive in photographs, in stonework, even in living memory.
Others exist only as a single line in a survey document, their physical form long since absorbed into the landscape without trace. A barn recorded at a place called Drumconragh in the Richmond area of County Dublin falls into the latter category: noted, named, and then essentially lost, its precise whereabouts unknown to researchers even today.
The sole reference to this structure comes from the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a remarkable administrative undertaking carried out under Cromwellian authority to document land ownership and improvements across Ireland following the upheavals of the 1640s. The survey recorded, among countless other details, the presence of a barn at Drumconragh, a place-name that no longer appears in common use in the area. The reference was brought to wider attention through Robert Simington's 1945 published edition of the survey records. Beyond that single citation, nothing further is known about the barn's construction, its dimensions, who built it, or how long it stood. Geraldine Stout, who compiled this record for the archaeological inventory, noted that the monument's exact location remains unresolved, with the general vicinity of St Joseph's Asylum for the Blind offered only as a cautious approximation.
For anyone curious enough to look, the area around Richmond in north County Dublin offers little in the way of obvious clues. The toponym Drumconragh has not survived in recognisable form on modern maps, which makes ground-level searching a matter of instinct rather than method. St Joseph's Asylum for the Blind, the institutional landmark used as a rough spatial reference in the record, provides at least a general orientation. What a visitor is really encountering here is the absence of a thing rather than the thing itself, a gap in the landscape where a seventeenth-century agricultural building once stood and was briefly noticed before disappearing entirely from the record.