Reply To: ‘Dutch Billys’

Gnidleif, reluctantly I think we have to accept that we could be both barking up the wrong tree with this, at either the Blind Quay or the Fishamble Street location. Also, I don’t think Dab’s idea works either.

We know quite a lot about that part of the west side of Fishamble Street and most of the houses at this location were either earlier or later than we’re looking for. The one house in that block that looks to be from our period clearly had a single cruciform roof and therefore would have had a only single conventional gable. The photograph comes again from Peter Walsh’s excellent article we mentioned above, from thirty years ago.

The same stretch in the late ’60s or so with a Corpo block on the site of the four storey house and showing the entrance to Fleece Alley in the distance.

These street views show the gradient of the street dropping away, whereas the O’Colmain painting rather shows it rising, which is one of the reasons I was originally keen on the other side of Fishamble Street being the possible location.

In the view below, note also the location of the two former Billys that faced west onto Wood Quay, with the northern one now made over in the Victorian warehouse style we talked about before.

Damn Paul and his inexhaustible supply of dodgy 19th century
etchings.

There a couple of other locations in the city where there is an elbow in the street and which once would have had houses of the right period, but I don’t really like any of them for it.

I’m beginning to think O’Colmain was pulling our chain.