Parle's Forge

Detached four-bay single-storey lobby entry thatched house with dormer attic, extant 1840, on a rectangular plan off-centred on single-bay single-storey flat-roofed projecting porch. "Improved", pre-1903, producing present composition. Occupied, 1911. Refenestrated, ----. Chicken wire-covered pitched and hipped or hipped gabled oat thatch roof, pressed iron ridge above exposed steel stretchers to ridge having exposed scallops, red brick Running bond off-central chimney stack having stepped capping, and blind stretchers to eaves having blind scallops. Limewashed rendered battered walls. Square-headed off-central door opening into house. Square-headed window openings with concrete or rendered sills, and concealed dressings including timber lintels framing replacement uPVC casement windows replacing two-over-two timber sash windows having part exposed sash boxes. Set back from line of road on a corner site with limewashed cylindrical piers to perimeter having shallow conical capping supporting flat iron gate.

A house identified as an integral component of the vernacular heritage of south County Wexford by such attributes as the rectilinear lobby entry plan form off-centred on an expressed, albeit later porch; the construction in unrefined local materials displaying a pronounced battered silhouette with sections of "daub" or mud suggested by an entry in the "House and Building Return" Form of the National Census (NA 1901; NA 1911); the disproportionate bias of solid to void in the massing; and the high pitched roof showing a degrading oat thatch finish. Having been reasonably well maintained, the elementary form and massing survive intact together with quantities of the original fabric: the introduction of replacement fittings to the openings, however, has not had a beneficial impact on the external expression or integrity of a house making a pleasing visual statement in a rural village street scene.