Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

@gunter wrote:

[IMG]Vernacular doesn’t preclude ‘deliberately stylistic’, as we’ve seen with some of the examples from Limerick, and apparently also Bundoran, according to Dr. Loeber.

gunter’s been dispensing bad information again, that should have read Buncrana, not Bundoran, I was getting my Buns crossed.

For anyone who thinks that the cute little twin gables on the back of 84 Cork Street [above], would never have been reflected by a similar, or even more elaborate, vernacular gabled treatment of the front facade, take a look at the Buncrana examples.

Ok there’s no twin gables here, but we’re in the same zone, small, two storey, vernacular versions of the tall, brick-built, terraced house tradition that was becoming omnipresent on the main streets of the major urban centres.

Some Donegal local histories suggest that these four houses were 17th century, and brick built, but that’s highly unlikely. Buncrana was laid out by a landlord called Vaughan ,who built himself ‘Buncrana Castle’, about 1717, and that would seem to be a more probable kind of date. There seems to have been some brick used in the detailing, but the houses look to be rubble stone built from the uneveness of the surfaces and the thickness of the gables.

One account says the terrace, which was on the Main Street, was called ‘MountTilly’ and it was demolished in the thirties.