Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

The 1840 Town Map is a bit less informative than I’d hoped.

There’s no clear rear line to the houses on the east side of the bull Ring, or even divisions to tell us if there were two or three houses, so it’s impossible to pick out the outline of any original returns.

The biggest apparent discrepancy in the Town Map is that it doesn’t show the passageway between the northern range and the eastern range as built over, even though the photographs depict the over-passageway structure here as apparently contemporary with the adjoining gabled houses [with a slightly altered roof profile].

There is an earlier map of Wexford town that records the main sites associated with the 1798 rising in the town and I think it depicts the passageway as an archway through buildings, but I’ll have to try to get another look at it to be sure.

I agree that a three-bay arrangement at first floor level would have been more usual, but I’m not sure that it existed in this case. This may have been dictated by the ‘shared’ gable, if in fact we’re right about this. If there was indeed the level of planning that we suspect went into this streetscape, they may have realized from the start that the shared gable could not have accommodated a central window and therefore decided to omit central windows from the rest of the scheme.

We need to find out who was behind this development, it can’t have just been a random collection of gentlemen, there must have been a guiding hand.

We’ll have to do more digging, I think.