1996:153 - GALWAY: Block 8, Kirwan’s Lane, Galway

A large stone wall bisected the site excavated in September–October 1995 as part of another phase of the Kirwan’s Lane development. The wall was comprised of two parts. The more impressive, adjacent to the street, was the remains of the gable of a previously existing house. Only a small portion of the side wall was still extant. A notable feature of the gable was the complete absence of any features, the fireplaces having been removed and the flues filled with cement.

A crude masonry wall abutted the gable, and appeared to be supported by it.

The excavation was therefore divided into two areas, effectively the inside of the earlier house and the portion directly behind the gable wall.

Many of the deposits in the interior had been scarped in more recent times to make way for a yellow brick floor. The surviving bed of medieval silts below the floor rested on a bed of loose stones, which appear to level off at the water-table. Two side walls keyed into the gable were exposed and continued in under the present surface of the lane. The absence of any return of the side walls underlines the likelihood that the building had been truncated and that the original structure probably continued further west, under the existing roadway. No deposits were recovered that could be associated with the construction of the house.

More extensive medieval deposits were recovered on the other side of the gable wall. Several beds of dark brown silts and shell-rich lenses yielded an almost exclusively Saintonge range of pottery, the nature of which points to a late thirteenth/early fourteenth-century date. These beds were cut to make way for two 3ft (almost 1 m) side walls continuing up the lane. Although they were directly aligned with the side wall of the other house, they were not keyed into the gable and appear to form the front and back walls of an entirely different structure abutting it. Further remains of the walls were recovered in the excavation of the adjacent site by Anne Connolly. A bed of post-medieval material sealed the construction cuts, and enveloped the plinth of the gable. Several postholes and small pits were observed at this level. A surface of limestone cobbles was retained by the side walls, but since it was directly overlain by modern deposits it does not seem likely that the cobbles can be traced to the seventeenth century.

Several additional limited trenches were cut outside the imprint of the houses, and yielded more deposits and masonry. No pottery surfaced, however. Much of the gable wall was removed after it had been extensively drawn and photographed, and while it was never fully established where the crude masonry wall stood in relation to the stratigraphy, its narrowness, its precarious stonework, and the support of the gable suggested an eighteenth/nineteenth-century date for the most part.

Editor’s note: Although excavated in 1995, this report did not arrive in time for inclusion in the bulletin of that year.

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