No 1. A fabulous rare 17th century most probably Irish, leather and brass studded dowry chest, dated 1693 and the letters A. AM on the slightly bowed top. The brass studs decorate the chest with swirls and roundels and stylised flowers. each end has original iron handles , the interior retains much of its marbled decorated paper lining. Two drawers at the base. The whole chest stands proudly on fant astic original brass cannon ball style feet the Chest is heavy so please email for shipping costs. Size are approximate .
We bought this it about 5 or 6 years ago, we found it in a stable attached to a very big old house called Ballyrankin house near Fearns and Bunclody in Wexford, it was in bad condition the bottom right drawer had a hole were the keyhole is about as big as a child`s fist going into the drawer and up into the main chest, it was full of 100 hundreds of thousand of very small pieces of coloured cloth that we are sure were flags most likely Irish battle flags, as it had been sent to Ballyrankin from Lt Col Gordan Shakespear-Higginson of the second battalion the Royal Dublin Fusiliers on his death in I think 1928 , he had a long history of military forebears many of whom were in India, we know this was in Africa in Cape town in the 1830`s as we found in the bottom left hand corner several small wonderful water colours of Cape town in the 1830`s a small place then! Underneath them were a lot of very wonderful engravings all dated from the 1780`s to the 1790`s which leads us to believe the chest was there for quite some time we found in another Higginson box a solid silver large belt buckle also inscribed Capetown 1833
