1993:160 - DROGHEDA: Stockwell Lane/Wellington Quay, Louth

Following the Office of Public Works placing a temporary preservation order on this site and the resulting trial trenching undertaken by Ms Rosanne Meenan in July 1993 (see Excavations 1993, No. 159) a full archaeological assessment was carried out in the three remaining areas as yet untouched by the commercial development.

The brief was not to excavate until natural was reached but rather to examine only to that depth which would be destroyed by the installation of the resulting lift shafts and oil tank.

Within a very limited area, we were able to confirm the presence of a mid-18th-century landscape, complete with cellar walls, drainage system and garden.

Trench 2 produced the most obvious and most visually striking feature, that of a mid-18th-century drain, but was on the whole the most significantly archaeologically void trench of the three. Of the 2m depth excavated, only a series of dumped material, dating no earlier than the 17th century, were uncovered. The drain cut through these dumped deposits.

Trenches 1 and 3 both produced evidence of abandonment of the site from the 14th to the 17th centuries. Seventeenth century material was dumped directly on top of sterile, natural clays which in turn sealed a possible 13th-century deposit in Trench 1 and a garden soil deposit of probable medieval date in Trench 3. There was no evidence in finds, deposits or structures certainly from the 15th century and possibly from the 14th century, through to the early 17th century. This evidence supports Sweetman's (1984) excavations at Shop St., Drogheda, where he also found a lack of evidence representing the 15th and 16th centuries. He proposed that this hiatus in activity along the quayside may well be due to the depopulation of the area due to the Black Death of 1348-9 and the eventual abandonment of this area as people moved away from the marginal areas as the demand on better land elsewhere dropped. The river Boyne then encroached on those areas which had once served as medieval dumping grounds and possibly gardens, effectively sealing the underlying medieval deposits from the overlying material dumped in the 17th century.

No evidence was found for the wooden wharf or revetment which Sweetman had uncovered in the course of his excavation some 250m east of this site. However, we cannot state with absolute conviction that a form of wooden quayside did not exist in this area as no one area was bottomed due to the depth restriction imposed on us by our brief. It is possible that evidence for such a structure remains within that depth of material unexamined.

All three trenches give plenty of evidence for the deliberate dumping of material along the quayside from the 17th century.

This must represent the deliberate raising and levelling of land in this area behind the stone quayside which was built in the early 17th century. This dumped material must have originated from a range of deposits within the town walls accounting for the range of finds, from the 12th-century Saintonge ware to the contemporary early 17th-century clay pipes.

While the upper 2m of stratigraphy has been totally cut into and destroyed across the site, the more significant and archaeologically interesting deposits occur at depths greater than this and may not have been destroyed by this latest development.

Sweetman, P.D., 1984 "Archaeological Excavations at Shop St., Drogheda, Co. Louth." PRIA., Vol 84 C, No. 5, 171-224.

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