1995:119 - GALWAY: 28 Abbeygate St. Upr., Galway

These excavations were conducted in advance of development and restoration work to a house of late medieval date. The site has an armorial fireplace dated 1684 on the second floor. It bears the arms of the Sherrat and French families.

Three cuttings were opened, two in the backyard of the house and one within an inner room on the ground floor of the building.

Cutting 1 was opened outside the back wall and measured 2.5m long and 2m in width. It commenced in front of a relieving arch which occurred in the exterior face of the back wall. There was no trace of this feature visible on the inside face because it was rendered. Prior to excavation it was suspected that this relieving arch might have taken the strain of the walling above an opening such as a doorway leading down to a basement. Other possible reasons for its presence may have been the previous existence of a garderobe or an opening with a slop-basin, but no evidence for either type of feature was visible on the interior of the building. Neither does there appear to be a sufficient thickness in the walling to house a chute or an alcove respectively for either type of feature. It seems that the feature occurred to enable safe building over soft ground as the wall in which it appeared proved on excavation to be a post-medieval one, built in the vicinity of a refuse pit.

The underside of the relieving arch was positioned some 0.16m above the concrete surface of the yard. This surface formed a floor across the entire area of the yard and had been laid over a thick layer of rubble which extended partly into Cutting 2 for a distance of 1–1.5m.

Below parts of the rubble and petering out in places was some smaller grey gravel and stone, which started at an average of 0.28m to 0.35m below the concrete. The foundation of the back wall of the house projected into the side of the cutting and consisted of both limestone and some granite boulders. The foundations were between 0.3m and 0.4m in depth and extended out from the base of the wall between 0.16m and 0.2m in places.

The foundation of the side wall of the adjacent late medieval building to the south of the site also impinged into the cutting and projected between 0.14m and 0.2m into it.

A grey sandy soil with very few stones occurred throughout Cutting 1. Cut into this was a pit which was mainly filled with a dark matter and contained much dark organic material with pottery clay pipes and a lot of animal bone, oyster shell, ash and charcoal. This pit contained the bulk of the finds from the site and seems to have originally been a refuse pit which was dug at a few metres out from the original back wall of the house.

Cutting 2 was an enlargement of an existing depression to the south side of Cutting 1. This was enlarged to establish the constructional phase and comparative date of the long wall which bounded the south-west side of the yard. This was clearly of late medieval date and had incorporated into it a number of relieving arches and windows of late medieval type, as well as fragments of what appeared to be the jambs of a doorway.

The layer of concrete extended in almost as far as this side wall but was laid only thinly in places and in some cases did not fully cover the wall footings of the later medieval wall. These were relatively crude and shallow where excavated, and rarely projected more than 0.1–0.14m from the base of the wall which they supported. They were at most 0.26m in depth and consisted of rough pieces of limestone with occasional pieces of granite, none of which was worked. Below the wall footings was some decayed mortar and gravel, which was the result of the installation of the late medieval wall.

Cutting 3 was located inside the original back wall of the front room of the building and measured 2m in length and 0.65m in width.

Beneath a modern concrete floor was a fill of sandy brown soil. This layer ranged from 0.48m to 0.58m in thickness and below was natural boulder clay which started at between 0.59m and 0.63m below the floor level. This seems to have been deliberately introduced and incorporated beneath it the internal dividing wall. Disappearing into the edge of the cutting, and also below the back wall, was a piece of wood that appeared to be supported or at least levelled up on a projecting piece of limestone which occurred immediately below it. While the wood is sawn rather than adzed and is finely finished, it may well be ancient. It measured 80–85mm in height and projected for a length of 0.62m in from the west face of the cutting.

The east face of the cutting also showed evidence of an intermediate layer of features between the concrete flooring and the sandy infill which was not in evidence in the opposite face of the cutting. Here, for most of the length of the cutting, were intermittent traces of a layer of old floorboards which were now reduced to a thin, gapped band of reddish-brown stains of wood, heavily affected by dry rot.

Traces of two rectangular wooden joists on which this floor had rested were in evidence embedded partly in the plaster of the wall. One of these small beams survived only as a stain. A better-preserved joist was found 1.85m from the corner and a sample of this was removed.

Finds were mainly of late medieval date and included German Westerwald stoneware, Spanish majolica, gravel-tempered wares from North Devonshire and English chafing dish fragments. The clay pipes, like the pottery, were all of late 16th- to 17th-century date, as were the ridge-tile fragments. A carved knife or fork handle of bone bearing a shield-shaped decoration with a saltire cross in the middle was also found.

18 College Rd, Galway