House - 16th/17th century, Clonroad Beg, Co. Clare

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House

House – 16th/17th century, Clonroad Beg, Co. Clare

At 24–26 Parnell Street in Ennis, a modest building holds onto a detail that most people walking past would never notice: a Jacobean chimney, the kind of ornamental, often elaborately shaped stack associated with early seventeenth-century architecture, quietly embedded in what is otherwise an unremarkable streetfront.

It is the sort of survival that suggests the building has been substantially altered over the centuries while retaining fragments of its original fabric beneath later additions.

The chimney links this structure directly to its neighbour, a seventeenth-century building known as McParland's, which preserves a similar feature. The two chimneys together point to a period of construction or significant rebuilding in the Jacobean era, roughly the early 1600s, when this style of chimney was fashionable across Ireland and Britain. Ennis at the time was a busy market town, its development shaped by the Franciscan friary founded there in the thirteenth century and by its role as the county town of Clare. That two buildings on the same street retain matching Jacobean chimneys suggests this part of town may have seen a concentration of substantial construction during that period, though the detail of who built or owned this particular house has not been recorded. The connection between the two properties was noted by Bradley, Halpin, and King in 1988, who identified the chimney at 24–26 as evidence of earlier fabric surviving within the existing structure.

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