House - 16th/17th century, Damastown, Co. Dublin

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House

House – 16th/17th century, Damastown, Co. Dublin

Somewhere along a private lane south of the Hollywood Great crossroads in County Dublin sits a stone house that goes by the oddly drowsy name of Naptown.

It is a substantial building, five bays wide and two storeys tall with a loft above, yet it carries its age quietly. What makes it worth a second look is partly structural and partly historical: the ground floor you would once have entered is now a basement, the original grade of the land effectively lost, so that a later entrance porch lifts visitors up to what is technically the first floor. The building seems, almost imperceptibly, to have sunk into its own past.

The Vernacular Buildings Survey of County Dublin, compiled in 1994, noted that while the house has origins in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, several of its features may date specifically to the late seventeenth century. Chief among these is a window positioned above eaves level at the centre of the front facade, set within a pediment, a triangular decorative element borrowed from classical architecture that was becoming fashionable in Irish domestic building during the latter half of the 1600s. The walls are of stone, plastered over, and measure roughly 0.8 metres thick, giving the building the solid, slightly fortress-like proportions common to vernacular architecture of the period. The high gabled roof is slated, with a chimney rising over each gable end. At the rear there is a two-storey return, an addition projecting back from the main block, and inside, a dog-legged staircase, one that changes direction at a landing rather than running in a straight flight, which is a detail that speaks to the pragmatic spatial thinking of the era.

Access is from a private lane, so the house is not something a casual passer-by will wander into. It lies south of the road running west from the Hollywood Great crossroads, and the approach itself signals that this is working rural County Dublin rather than any kind of managed heritage site. The building's dimensions, 14.20 metres in length and 7.50 metres in width, give it a presence that is immediately readable even from outside. Those with a particular interest in early vernacular domestic architecture will find the pediment window a quietly rewarding detail, a small flourish of late seventeenth-century ambition on an otherwise plainly practical facade.

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