2025:295 - 22-24 Aungier Street, Dublin, Dublin

Planning permission was granted for development at Nos 22, 23 (incorporating 23A), and 24 Aungier Street (Protected Structures) and No. 40 Bow Lane East, Dublin 2.
The most relevant investigation to the present site was that undertaken in 2016 (16E0100) on the site of the Marlin Hotel, immediately to the northeast of the subject site. Here two parallel running ditches were uncovered, the dates and the stratigraphy of which appear to suggest that both were originally dug and started to silt up between 860-1030 AD and were kept in use until between 1040-1260, with the upper deposits and their associated finds suggesting that the ditches may still have been partly visible until the 1660s to 1680s when the Aungier Estate was developed. However the results suggested that the two ditches were isolated in the centre of the site, with no evidence of any further early medieval or later medieval features or deposits present. This limited activity, it was suggested by the investigator, may indicate that the area of the site was located outside of any boundaries denoting settlement or burial associated with the medieval hospital and church of St Stephen with the alignment of Bow Lane probably representing a boundary or the limits of burial/medieval habitation. This may point, it was postulated, to the two ditches being originally located within field systems or agricultural undeveloped lands.
The results of the present investigations would appear to support this hypothesis. No significant archaeological deposits were encountered and no early artifacts were recovered from either the existing basement area of the area to the rear of the No. 24. In addition the stratigraphy encountered in the area of the new basement suggested undisturbed buried A-horizon soils resting directly on natural subsoils. This would suggest that the area of No. 24 Aungier Street may have been largely agricultural and semi-rural up to the point where Aungier Street was developed in the second half of the 17th century.
This conclusion is supported, at least tentatively, by two maps, the first is Speed’s map of 1610, which shows the area of what was to become Aungier Street as open and undeveloped. Similarly de Gomme’s map of some 60 years later, showing the line of Aungier Street, now laid out, but the area of the site, approximately opposite Butter Lane, is still largely open and undeveloped.
The results of the archaeological monitoring carried out at No. 24 Aungier Street suggests that this area of the city was largely undeveloped and probably semi-rural and agricultural and only developed with the works associated with laying out the Aungier estate in the later half of the 17th century.