Survey Data
Reg No
40503174
Rating
Regional
Categories of Special Interest
Architectural
Original Use
Shop/retail outlet
Historical Use
House
In Use As
House
Date
1860 - 1870
Coordinates
216802, 411136
Date Recorded
01/12/2008
Date Updated
--/--/--
Description
Attached two-bay three-storey house, built c. 1864, having later shopfront inserted. Now in use as a house. One of a pair with the building adjoining to the north (see 40503173). Pitched natural slate roof with smooth rendered chimneystacks to either end (shared to the north), and projecting eaves course. Painted rendered walls. Square-headed window openings with stone sills and one-over-one pane timber sliding sash windows. Square-headed door opening to north of façade with half-glazed timber panelled door. Modern shopfront having square-headed window and door openings with modern fittings, and with modern timber fascia over. Road-fronted to the south of the centre of Letterkenny.
Appraisal
This modest mid-terrace building, dating to the second half of the nineteenth-century, retains its early character and form despite the insertion of a later shopfront. This building is one of the few traditional buildings along Main Street, Letterkenny, that retains much of its salient fabric including natural slate roof and timber sliding sash windows. It forms a pair of buildings with its neighbour adjacent to the north (see 40503173) that appear to have been built as part of a single construction project. It dates to a period when Letterkenny was a thriving and expanding regional market town. The scale, height and proportions of the building combine with those of its neighbours to create an interesting and uniform streetscape. Buildings of this type were, until recent years, a ubiquitous feature of the streetscapes of Irish towns. However, most of these buildings have been insensitively altered or replaced, which makes this relatively intact example in Letterkenny an increasingly rare relatively intact surviving example of its type and date. This building makes a positive contribution to the streetscape to the south of the centre of Letterkenny, and is an addition to the built heritage of the town.