1973:044 - MASSEREENE, Antrim

The proposed line of a new by-pass road around the west side of Antrim town runs across the reputed site of a Third Order Franciscan friary “supposed to have been founded about the year 1500 by one of the O’Neills”. The “Site of Abbey” on the 0.S. maps is a level area of woodland and gardens backing onto the S bank of the Six-Mile-Water about 200m west of Massereene Bridge. No remains whatever were visible on the surface and after almost two weeks of fruitless trial-trenching a local resident pointed out a spot in his garden where he had uncovered ‘old masonry’. A trial-cutting excavated due west of this spot in the open ground outside the garden uncovered one corner of the foundation of the wall of the west end of a little plain church.

The building was 7m50cm wide internally with side walls 80cm wide and the W gable 1m10 wide. In places the walling survived to a height of 50cm, in others only a robber trench marked its line. It was only possible, because of the nearby garden, to examine a 5m50cm length of the building. No details such as positions of doors or windows could be traced or inferred and no dressed stones were found. The interior of the building contained numerous mixed-up and (at the time of their interment) very shallow burials. The sherds of an almost complete everted-rim cooking pot were found mixed-up at this level along with some iron knives and a buckle. The burial soil was uniformly covered by a loose grey soil layer containing stones and small crumbled lumps of mortar, evidently representing decay or demolition debris (more likely) of the building. Eleven pennies of 1601 were found scattered in the base of the topsoil immediately over this layer and still within the confines of the church walls.

Outside the west end of the church an unexpected series of trenches and gullies were found but most important it was discovered that the church had been enclosed (as far as the evidence from the W end shows) by a curving irregular V-sectioned ditch 2 to 3m wide and 2m deep. It ran so close to the corners of the church at the W end that they were almost undermined by its eroding sides. During the period of use of the church the ditch, half-filled with peat and slime had been roughly paved over. In the ditch bottom was an iron coulter pushed into a plough-sock, some animal bones; ‘everted-rim’ pottery and green-glazed wheel-thrown pottery. In the silt in the very bottom of the ditch eleven coins comprising a small hoard were found. The coins must have “got into” the ditch shortly after it was opened and they are likely to have been in circulation in the period 1501-05.

The site is interesting in that everything found there seems to be very reliably restricted in date to the 16th century. It is hoped in 1974 to try and recover the overall plan of the church, clear some area of its E end, to test for other buildings and to examine further the enigmatic outer ditches and gullies.