Dutch Billys and Drains

Dutch Billy in the slums of Dublin. Photographer Robert French. Image courtesy The National Library of Ireland, Lawrence Photograph Collection.

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. This 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 in what is now the square. Could these be Dutch Billys, or was it just artistic licence and an embellishment of the drawing by Smith? So called Dutch Billys, 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 Billys 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? 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.

Section of illustration of Kilcullen Bridge showing possible Dutch Billys. Image courtesy TCD Digital Collections repository. 

References:

Wexford archaeologist Colm Moriarty's article about Dutch Billys.

 

Kilcullen Bridge illustration in the TCD archives. This is a higher resolution version of the image on the Kildare Archaeological Society's website.

 

Con Costello's article about Sir William Smith's four illustrations of Kildare.