2007:480 - DUBLIN: 53 Kimmage Road Lower, Dublin

Four test-trenches were excavated in the garden of St Gladys, a large detached early 20th-century house. The presence of the Poddle watercourse to the west led to the assessment, although cartographical research identified a mill-race associated with a paper mill at Mount Argus as being of greater relevance.

The boundary to the south is a modern one, on the far side of a tree-lined ditch, which would appear to be the remnants of the mill-race extending from the paper mills in Mount Argus towards a flour mill at Mount Jerome. The ditch had steep sides, forming a V-shaped profile, and was c. 1m deep and 2.5m in width. The depth was not consistent along its extent and it appears to have been infilled in a number of places. It was heavily overgrown at the time of the initial inspection; however, the vegetation had been removed by the time the assessment was undertaken.

The boundary to the south-east and east consists of a rendered wall to Kimmage Road with decorative entrance gates. Just inside this boundary the area was planted with flowerbeds along the line of the culverted mill-race. The watercourse along this stretch was culverted in a series of RC boxes in the 1980s, picked up in two of the trenches. The building line associated with the development is to be set 3m back from the culvert as per instructions from the City Council, to ensure that no development or ground-breaking works will take place that may cause inadvertent damage.

The site lies approximately two-thirds of the way up the eastern side of the Poddle Valley and the water running through the mill-race must have been pumped up to its elevated level just to the south-west at the paper mill. The mill-race would appear to postdate John Rocque’s 1756 depiction of the area and to have been in place when William Duncan’s survey was being undertaken c. 1820. The original stream is depicted on the first-edition OS map, running along the townland boundary below the site, at the lowest contour. This, the original course of the Poddle, was diverted again to the north, perhaps in the 1170s, on the site of what became the Greenmount Mills. The diversion is related to the construction of the City Watercourse and the construction of the Abbey Stream by the abbey of St Thomas, which diverted the water supply through the monastic liberty of St Thomas’s Court.

The original course beyond to the north of the Greenmount Mills appears to have dried up in antiquity but can be traced on the ground to the eastern side of Griffith Barracks, across the South Circular Road (where a very obvious dip to the west of Leonard’s Corner signals its presence), continuing north until it meets the diverted stream again at Cross Poddle (Dean Street).

The evidence of the other trenches indicated that the site of the house appears to have been quarried out, perhaps in the late 19th century, to be backfilled with a mixture of soil and domestic refuse immediately prior to the construction of St Gladys.