irish leather chest

o 1. A fabulous rare 17th century Irish, leather and brass studded dowry chest, dated 1693 and the letters A M on the slightly bowed top. The brass studs decorate the chest with swirls and roundels and stylized flowers, each end has the original iron handles , the interior retains much of its marbled decorated paper lining. Two drawers at the base. The whole chest stands proudly on fantastic original brass cannon ball style feet The Chest is heavy so please email for shipping costs. Sizes 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 Ireland , it was in slightly rough condition the bottom right drawer had a hole were the keyhole is ( now restored) 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  watercolours of Cape town in the 1830`s  a small place then! Underneath them were a lot of very wonderful engravings all dated from the 1700`s to the 1790`s   which leads us to believe the chest was there for quite some time we also found a solid silver large belt buckle also inscribed Capetown 1833