House - 16th/17th century, Parslickstown, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
House
Somewhere between a business park and a footnote in a seventeenth-century land survey, the site at Parslickstown in County Dublin quietly carries a history that its current surroundings do little to advertise.
What appears today as an ordinary late Victorian house absorbed into a modern enterprise centre was, according to one of Ireland's most important historical documents, already farmland of some significance four centuries ago.
The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed Cromwellian-era record of land ownership and settlement drawn up following the upheavals of the 1641 rebellion and subsequent warfare, notes two "farme houses" at Parslickstown, possibly occupying the same ground on which the present house later stood. The survey was compiled as part of a broader effort to document and redistribute Irish land, and its entries, however brief, are among the few surviving traces of rural settlement patterns from that period. The current Parslickstown House is a late nineteenth-century structure, two storeys and four bays wide with an additional wing, typical of the modest but solid domestic architecture of that era in the Dublin hinterland. The connection to the earlier farm buildings is suggestive rather than certain, but the continuity of a named place across several centuries carries its own quiet weight.
The house now sits within the Base enterprise centre, a repurposing that has left its character somewhat absorbed into the practical demands of a working business facility. Worth noting for those with an interest in the built heritage of north County Dublin is that the site was, at the time of writing, due to be removed from the Record of Monuments and Places, the statutory list that affords some degree of recognition and protection to sites of archaeological or historical interest. That pending removal makes the site an unusual case, a place on the edge of official memory rather than at its centre. The house itself is not publicly accessible in the conventional sense, but its fabric is visible from the approach to the enterprise centre, and the surrounding landscape, unremarkable as it may now appear, rewards a moment's thought about what those two farme houses once looked like against an open Dublin plain.