On this day in 1695, Jonathan Swift is ordained as an Anglican priest and given the post of Kilroot in Ireland where he will live from March of that year until May 1696.

He would live in what became known as The Roundhouse, a white limewashed thatched cottage where four straight sections of wall did not join together in right angles.

The curved sections formed one continuous exterior wall and one local folklore was Swift commented that the “devil would never catch him in a corner.”

The cottage survived for four centuries from the 17th century until it was demolished in the 1960s.

It was here that Swift allegedly first got inspired about the giants he later wrote about in Gulliver’s Travels.