Straying
a bit again from the scope of this group into my other interest,
architecture. Not that I know a huge amount about it, but as a child I
always had a fascination with and appreciation of the design of
buildings and structures new and old. The image below is one of several drawings of Kilcullen Bridge made over the last 250 years or so. It's from a set of
four illustrations of Kildare held in the Manuscript & Archives
Research Library of Trinity College Dublin, drawn in 1795 by Sir William
Smith, an artist and captain in the Royal Engineers. You may have seen
the illustration before, but the image in the TCD archive is a
higher resolution version. What's interesting is the terrace of
buildings with street-facing gables and tall chimneys, approximately
located where Fallon's now stands. Could these be Dutch Billies, or was
it just artistic licence and an embellishment of the drawing by Smith?
So called Dutch Billies, reputedly
named after King William of Orange, were a style of pre-Georgian
architecture, brought to Ireland by French Huguenots and Dutch and
Flemish protestants fleeing persecution in the late 17th century. The
style is common in Amsterdam. Many of the Billies in Dublin and other
towns were later either "Georgianified" by having walls built in front
of their gables or demolished in the last century as they fell into
disrepair, which was a shame. Maybe the three story building adjacent to
the lane down to Brennan's yard was the remains of this terrace? This
was demolished in the early 70s to make way for the building The River
Cafe is located in. It didn't have a gable, but the roof could have been
modified. The other thing I noticed are the arches at river level. What
could they have been for? Were they drains to allow water to flow back
to the river from the square when water level dropped? Or an intake for a mill race, feeding a mill that pre-dated the 19th-century mill that was demolished in 1985? Before the dam
was built on the Liffey in the 1940s and regulated water flow, flood
waters extended into the square as far as Brennan's Hardware and on one
occasion, according to my late neighbour Fred Maher, the bridge in
Athgarvan was closed for fear of it being washed away when the water
level became dangerously high. There appears to be the gable wall of a
building behind the two arches with what could be a mullioned window
(the division between two openings visible in the higher resolution
image). A medieval building which was gone by the time the first edition
OSI map was drafted? On this map, there's also a structure in the
square, in front of what is now McTernans. Could it have been a market
house? We'll probably never know.
