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You say that, we stayed in a farmhouse in Ireland. Two rooms - one bedroom and the kitchen/sitting room, around a huge hearth. With the cowshed directly attached. Ours was vaguely modernised, hearth ripped out, small bathroom add-on. Without the warm hearth, the building started to suffer. If only these old stone cottages were insulated beneath and outside.

Small windows were a result of the window tax.

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Well, peasant cottages from the 19th century, for sure; I lived in one at one point too, and there the cooking would have been done on the hearth, the focus of the living space.

That cottage was cool in summer and cold in winter and damp all year around, walls made from stone and mortar over 1 metre thick, originally with a thatch roof but since replaced with tile after a fire. The economy that built those cottages was basically subsistence living, hardly a structure built with surplus to make different choices.

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