House - 17th century, Neworchard, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
House
A seventeenth-century house in County Kilkenny owes its survival in the record not to any grand architectural distinction but to a surveyor's pen and a few rows of fruit trees.
On a parish map produced as part of the Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, a small house is shown near the eastern edge of what is now the townland of Neworchard, with trees carefully drawn to its north, west, and south, the whole annotated simply as 'orchard'. The Down Survey was a vast mapping project directed by William Petty to catalogue land ownership in Ireland following the Cromwellian conquest, and its parish maps, preserved in the collection known as Hibernia Regnum, remain one of the earliest systematic attempts to record the Irish landscape in this way.
The written terrier, a document listing landholders that accompanied the parish map, names Michael Radgett as the proprietor in 1640 and notes plainly that in New Orchard there is 'a good orchard'. That description, modest as it is, tells us something useful: the place was already established and productive by the time Petty's surveyors arrived. The name itself, Neworchard, appears to have stuck. The same location, showing a house and farmyard, appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 to 1840, and by the revision of 1945 to 1946 the site is explicitly labelled New Orchard, suggesting a continuity of occupation and identity across three centuries. Radgett's orchard, once noted as a local feature worth recording, quietly gave the townland the name it still carries today.
