Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

@Devin wrote:

Temple Bar (now demolished).

@Devin wrote:

Originally Posted by Devin
So is there anything else this central rainwater outlet – on a house in a market square – could have been? Could it have held a beam to hoist goods into the building’s enlarged second-floor window ope, before being reused as a water outlet?

Btw gunter, you haven’t addressed the above, from 3 pages ago.

……. At your convenience (he said wryly)

Sorry Devin, . . . . I didn’t think you were serious.

‘Could the central rainwater outlet have held a beam to hoist goods?’

Well, . . . . that is possible, if distinctly unusual for Dublin.

The example you’ve posted from Temple Bar is just about the only example I know of and I can’t think of another ‘Billy’ that is recorded as having one. Of the 180, or so, ‘Weaver’s Houses’ in the vicinity, where you could well imagine a hoist beam being a useful feature, not one is recorded as having a projecting hoist beam. Having said that, quite a number of the Weavers Houses that featured a central attic storey window also featured a kind of recess above it, high up near the apex of the triangular gables. In surviving photographs this recess is often shown bricked-up, but it may well have originally been a shuttered opening out through which a movable hoist beam could have been manoeuvered . . . in theory.

This Newmarket house is a challenge to re-imagine in it’s original form, there’s no question about that, but the first step has to be to separate out the features that are clearly alterations [like the flat parapet with it’s odd slated capping that merges with the roof apexes] and the features that are clearly original [like the twin roof structure iself], everything else in the analysis should flow from this first step.

I’ll try and get my hands on a clearer copy of this image, and of the Barker drawing that appears to show a twin-Billy of remarkably similar design, before you start complaining again that I’m posting nothing new.:rolleyes: