- Margaret Street, Cork City, Cork

In May 1960 human remains were discovered during trench-digging near the Red Abbey⁵⁹ at Margaret Street in Cork City. The find was reported to the NMI, who passed the query on to the Department of Archaeology, University College, Cork. The site was investigated by Mr Edward Fahy, upon whose report this account is based. The burials were discovered within the area formerly occupied by the fifteenth-century Augustinian priory known as Red Abbey. The priory passed out of the hands of the Augustinians in 1641, was used as a sugar refinery in the mid-eighteenth century and was burned down in 1799. Since then, remnants of the buildings have been levelled or absorbed into later commercial buildings, with only the tower surviving. The skeletons of an adult and a child lay in shallow graves scooped out of the soil, and the backfill of the graves contained an admixture of building rubble. The child burial overlay that of the adult. Both burials were fully excavated in the presence of the city coroner, a superintendent and a Garda sergeant from Barrack Street Garda Station. No finds were made that would indicate the date of the burials; the presence of the rubble in the fill of the graves and the shallowness of the burials suggest that these were unauthorised insertions made after the abandonment of the priory but before its reuse as a sugar refinery in or about 1750. The site was not a public burial ground. The skeletons were removed by the Gardaí and subsequently reinterred in St Joseph’s cemetery.

59. SMR CO074-041——. IGR 167534 71375