A NEW area plan for Dingle and its hinterland, now before the public for comment, focuses on the area’s built heritage with a core conservation area in the town, along with a variety of structures outside marked for preservation.
While much of the focus recently has been on the mushrooming of new houses around Dingle during the boom, the street layout of Dingle is as it appears in the Ordnance Survey map of the town in 1841 and is “relatively unaltered”, conservationists who helped draw up the plan noted.
The varying ridge heights of the houses on the streets are to be preserved and a central core area bounded on the north by Main Street and the south by the Mall and including Goat Street, Green Street, John Street, Emlagh Cottages and dwellings on The Wood are to form this preserved architectural core.
The designation will ensure that original external features such as roofs, cast-iron drain pipes and gutters, iron railings, smooth plaster walls and windows are preserved.
The traditional vibrant shopfronts and old signage, much of it in Irish, associated with Dingle town is also to be protected and the council is to encourage refurbishing existing name plates and shopfronts, according to the plan.
Outside of Dingle, several 19th-century buildings are earmarked for preservation.
These include the old presbytery at Ballyferriter; the 1851 school house, no longer in use, at Emlagh, Ballydavid; and a signal tower now in ruins but part of a network of coastal towers built in 1800 in Kerry to warn of invading French. The towers were used again during the first World War.
Other structures to be preserved include a single-storey red corrugated iron-roofed cottage, common up to 30 years ago in Kerry but now, according to conservationists, extremely rare.
In the village of Anascaul, two cast-iron water pumps dating to 1865 and manufactured by a Scottish company should be protected, it is suggested.
These structures are in addition to already listed churches and schools.
The public is invited to comment and the full council will vote on the proposals which take effect in 2012 for a period of six years, before they are formally adopted.