County: Down Site name: DOWNPATRICK: Cathedral Hill
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: —
Author: Ruairí Ó Baoill, c/o D.O.E. Environment Service
Site type: Historic town
Period/Dating: Multi-period
ITM: E 748119m, N 844502m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 54.327712, -5.722725
A brief excavation was carried out in Downpatrick between June 30 and July 7, 1994. This was the first phase in an evaluation of the archaeological potential of the area on Cathedral Hill, between English St. and Market St. The excavation took place on the possible site of a proposed St Patrick's Heritage Centre and was funded by Downpatrick Project. It was directed by the writer on behalf of Archaeological Development Services Ltd. in co-operation with the DOE Environment Service.
The excavation site is known to have been on the periphery of the medieval settlement of Cathedral Hill, between the urban core of the town on the English St. ridge and, downslope, the marshy area now occupied by Market St.
A trench 40m long (north-west/south-east) and 2m wide was excavated down the slope of Cathedral Hill close to, and east of, the enclosed Picnic Garden area. Using a mixture of archaeologically supervised machining and manual excavation, the western half of the trench was fully excavated to subsoil– a mix of glacial gravels and, towards the south, clays. Although terracing carried out in the post-medieval period had removed much of the early stratigraphy, features dating to the medieval period and possibly earlier remained cut into the subsoil. These mostly took the form of postholes or pits, though one was a slight gully and another, possibly, a truncated ditch. Two of the excavated features yielded sherds of locally produced Downpatrick medieval pottery dating to the 13th or 14th centuries AD. Of the several dozen sherds of early pottery retrieved during the excavation, two were souterrain ware, the rest glazed or unglazed medieval Downpatrick wares.
The post-medieval terracing may be contemporary with the 18th- and 19th-century reclamation of land from the Quoile marshes and tributary streams leading to the creation of Market St. and Church St. There had also been more recent landscaping of the area. Post-medieval pottery types recovered include sherds of Staffordshire combed slipware, stoneware, transfer printed ware, creamware, delft and brown and black earhenwares.
5–33 Hill Street, Belfast BT1 2LA
