CRAFT & CONSERVATION PRACTITIONERS
Are you a craftsperson, conservation practitioner or heritage professional with insights into 18th-century building conservation and historic craft practice ? CRAFTVALUE is interested in learning more about traditional craft skills and modern conservation practices, as a means of better understanding the largely tacit and undocumented processes of early modern craft production. We want to discover more about methods of making and materials employed in historic building fabrics, and about how the multi-layered surface effects were achieved. Can you help?
To get in touch please email us at craftvalue@tcd.ie
Do you know of any interesting fragments of important 18th century Irish buildings? We are looking for help in tracking down examples of craftsmanship in stone and wood from lost houses, churches, and public buildings. Sometimes such fragments were rescued during demolition, sometimes they were built into nearby boundary walls and are now known only to a few local historians. Such details can be important records of buildings otherwise known only from photographs or drawings.
Below is a surviving carved console from the great house at Summerhill, Co. Meath (c. 1731; burnt 1921) derived from plate XLVII of James Gibbs’s Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture of 1732 (Private Collection, courtesy of David Griffin). If you know of any further fragments of this house or others, please let us know at craftvalue@tcd.ie .
One of the finest lost country houses in Ireland was Eyrecourt, Co. Galway (c. 1670), which was left derelict after the contents and interior fittings were sold in the 1930s. It was eventually demolished, leaving only scattered fragments of its former glory. Its famous staircase is in storage in the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts. Below is part of a massive window architrave rescued by Peter Pearson exhibited at his recent Georgian Society exhibition (Spring 2020). Some of the panelled interiors were refitted in St Donat’s Castle, Glamorgan, where they remain today. Do you know of any other surviving fragments of Eyrecourt?
