1988:48 - MOYNE CHURCH, Moyne, Mayo

Excavation was first carried out at this site by Conleth Manning of the Office of Public Works and this has been published in P.R.LA. 87C (1987), 37-70. The most recent excavation has been completed, but conservation work to the church and the enclosing cashel wall is continuing and work under a FÁS scheme, supervised by the writer, is expected to continue during 1989.

The recent excavations were restricted mainly to the vicinity of the church, although cutting A was made outside the site in advance of the building of a toilet. Cuttings B-D were made in advance of conservation work to the church. The cutting by a farmer of a drain outside the enclosing cashel wall revealed several features visible in the section face and the opportunity was taken to examine these (cuttings E and F) before the drain was refilled. Conservation to the cashel wall provided an opportunity to examine a section of it which had been partly rebuilt (cutting G).

Cutting A
A cutting 5m long by 3m wide was made outside the monastic enclosure. The area had been disturbed when the present road to the site was constructed, but no disturbance to the strata below humus had taken place. No features were encountered in the subsoil and the only finds were late 19th-century clay pipe fragments and crockery. Both small, light, wake pipes and more functional ordinary pipes were represented.

Cutting B
A narrow cutting, 6.1m long and 0.5m wide, was made along the middle of the south side of the church which probably dates to c.1200. It was confined to a narrow band because of the presence of modern graves over much of the area. It was intended to recover, in advance of conservation work, stones fallen from the church wall which could be seen projecting through the sod in areas. Finds were few, consisting of a small polished stone axe head from the infill of a late grave, a number of pieces of iron slag, mortar and some clay pipe fragments. The area was found to have been much disturbed by late, unmarked burials, and only a small area immediately in front of the doorway remained undisturbed. The burials were not excavated and, though unmarked, were obviously of a late date on clay pipe evidence. A small pocket of bone (Feature 111), directly beneath the plinth, seems to have been the result of tidying-up of bone disturbed in advance of the laying down of the plinth. A larger pit (Feature 1) also had a similar origin. It is cut into the old subsoil, and a further, less formal, scatter of bones occurs at a deeper level in the subsoil. The area immediately outside the south doorway was undisturbed by the burials and here the original subsoil and boulder clay survived intact.

Cutting C
This was made at the west end of the church to facilitate conservation work on the wall and to see whether any trace of an early west door survived. A two period plinth, a continuation of that on the south side (and that already visible to the north and east sides) was uncovered, but no trace of a doorway was found. Redeposited bones from modern graves and plaster moulding from an adjacent grave-surround were discovered. The foundation plinth had been robbed-out completely on the north end. Finds were few apart from a hollow scraper and large quantities of chert, which were definitely worked. These were in redeposited soil on the site of the robbed-out west wall and came from material which had been disturbed by grave digging. Some iron slag, a bone knife-handle, some worked antler and numerous clay pipe fragments (all of 19th-century date) were also recovered.

The plinth beneath the west wall is of two periods. One (Plinth 1), is narrow and deep, the second and later one (Plinth 2), related to the church of c. 1200 and has been added to the first, at a higher level. At the start of Plinth 2, a large sandstone bullaun stone has been reused. This, like the rest of the Plinth, is at a higher level than Plinth 1 and it has obviously been reused because it had become perforated right through. This bullaun rests upon the upper level of the four large, rough, quoins which form the corner of Plinth 1. One stone of Plinth 2 overlies and partly blocks off the top of the bullaun.

Plinth 2, and the building of the church of c. 1200 itself, seem to have been responsible for some disturbance of earlier human remains and a small pocket of bone underlying it seems to be the result of a reburial (Feature V 11).

Cutting D
This cutting was made to find the line of the wall, recover stone and facilitate conservation work to the north wall of the church. This wall had collapsed for a little more than half its length and a part of the surviving section had drifted away from the north-east corner of the church.

On excavation it was found that the building method used had probably caused a large crack in and contributed to the collapse of the rest of the wall. Towards the north-east end of the wall the plinth was built up in the form of three large steps. Two burials (Burials Nos 1 and 2) partly underlay and pre-dated the lower step of this plinth. Further on, to the north-west, the foundation was straight and consisted of a regular plinth apparently thrown roughly into a foundation trench. It is possible that the plinth was once wider here and that it originally splayed out slightly to form a narrow buttress at its base which was later destroyed by grave digging, but there are no large stones forming a series of steps here. The north-west corner of the wall and its plinth have been obliterated by two modern graves dug on the line of the church wall. Just before the first grave the plinth only survived below ground. Here it curved out again dramatically, probably due to being pushed out under the weight of the weakened north wall. The stone looks built here however, and the curve in the foundation may also have been intentional like the triple stepped bulge near the north-east end.

One of the burials was accompanied by two quartzite pebbles and a limestone sphere. Other finds from the cutting were of iron slag and chert and there were also numerous clay pipe fragments.

Cutting D1
A cutting 0.5m wide and 3.5m long was made outside the concrete kerb on the line of the north wall of the church in order to see whether any of the original church wall or plinth had survived. A few stones were found in a row beneath the foundations of the modern gravekerb but apart from one, these were relatively small and seem to have been a foundation for that feature.

Cutting E
An area some 2m in length was worked on here and the archaeological features in it planned. A drain (Feature 1) was visible in the section of the west face. The bottom of the ditch had been dug below the natural subsoil level, but the corresponding section of the drain, which was also trowelled-down, produced no archaeological features. This may be due partly to the bulldozing which has taken place in the field and also the fact that the level of the field is considerably lower on the side of the drain. The drain was rectangular or flat bottomed overlain by a layer of topsoil and humus. The fill of the ditch consisted of large and medium sized stones and a fill of dark soil containing large quantities of bone. The drain was cut through the light brown subsoil and into the underlying grey natural subsoil or boulder clay.

Cutting F
An area 3m long on the west face of the ditch was worked on when a U-shaped ditch-like feature was identified in the cleaned-down section face. The feature turned out to be a U-shaped pit which had been infilled with earth and stones. The only finds from it were a small amount of animal bone and a clay pipe-stem fragment which was found among the stones in the upper fill; the bones, however, came from the lower part of the fill and were found among the large stones which had been inserted into its base.

The presence of the pipe stem fragment suggests a very late date for this pit.

Cutting G
The removal of a large tree stump and the remains of a modern field wall running at right angles to the cashel wall necessitated the excavation of a segment of the cashel wall down to the first course level (that is, the level at which the original exterior face of the wall survived). All the stones which were temporarily removed were loose fieldstones which had been either part of the original fill of the cashel wall or had been thrown up from the surface of the field outside at a later date. The wall material, which consisted of stone and some clay in the lower part, with some bone, antler and snail shells interspersed throughout, was excavated to a depth of only 0.6m-0.8m into the wall, and the area of excavation was limited to a section some 4.5m in width. The interior of the wall survived to a height of 1.85m-1.9m and at least some of the top 0.2m-0.3m had been rebuilt. By contrast, the exterior face survived to a height of only three courses max., measuring some 0.65m above the present ground level.

At the time of writing the conservation of the church has been almost completed. The south doorway proved to be of two periods and probably superceded the original pre-c. 1200 doorway in the west gable of which no trace now survives. The south doorway dates in its early form to around the 14th century, but at a later date, probably in the 15th or early 16th century, was superceded by a much lower door in which three of the jamb stones from the 14th century were reused. Three of the four missing jamb stones have been recovered and the door has been conserved so as to show the work of both periods.

18 College Road, Galway