1996:041 - CORK: Grattan Street/Adelaide Street Carpark, Cork

NMI Burial Excavation Records

County: Cork Site name: CORK: Grattan Street/Adelaide Street Carpark

Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 96E0181

Author: Maurice F. Hurley, Cork Corporation

Site type: Urban medieval

Period/Dating:

ITM: E 566857m, N 571962m

Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 51.898825, -8.481586

The excavation was undertaken by Cork Corporation, in July/August 1996, prior to selling the site for redevelopment.

The main features uncovered were a 16.8m length of city wall of seventeenth-century date and an area (12m east-west, 16m north-south) of medieval urban stratigraphy lying within the city walls.

The city wall stood on the western side of the site, extending north-south parallel to Grattan Street. Only a width of 1.72m of the inner face of the wall was found within the excavation trench. It is estimated that the wall is between 2.2m and 2.4m wide at the level where it was truncated, i.e. 0.63m below the modern street surface. The wall stood to a height of 1.2–1.3m above a foundation layer of loosely set limestone boulders, occurring to a depth of 0.5–0.6m beneath the wall. The rubble may be derived from the collapse of an earlier wall of possible medieval date as it overlay organic layers containing thirteenth- and fourteenth-century pottery. The surviving city wall was constructed within a foundation trench cut from post-medieval levels, and seventeenth-century pottery and clay pipes were incorporated in the backfill.

The wall face was rendered with hard sandy mortar and in this respect it resembles a seventeenth-century rebuilding of part of the city wall at Kyrl's Quay (Hurley 1995, 73, 79–80). The archaeological evidence is corroborated by a historical reference of 1624, wherein Robert Browne promised to rebuild a portion of the western wall of the city and 'to lay it over above with fair large stones equal to the rest of the said wall' (Caulfield 1876, 115–16).

Within the city, organic refuse accumulated in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries above the estuarine silts, and several refuse-pits were dug. One large pit contained numerous cattle horn-cores. A number of linear trenches were probably drainage channels. Two medieval burgage plots were represented within the trench. The first domestic dwelling erected in this area was a stone house of late seventeenth-century date. A wooden stave-built cistern was placed in a pit adjacent to the house. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century remains were represented by the stone-built walls of a domestic house and a furnace and pit associated with late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century industrial processes.

References
Caulfield, B. 1876 The Council Book of the Corporation of the City of Cork from 1609 to 1643 and from 1690 to 1800. Guildford.
Hurley, M.F. 1995 Excavations in Cork city: Kyrl's Quay/North Main Street and at Grand Parade (Part 1). Journal of the Cork Historical and ArchaeologicalSociety 100, 47–90.

City Hall, Cork