County: Kilkenny Site name: GOWRAN: Main Street
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 96E0314
Author: Kieran Campbell
Site type: Excavation - miscellaneous
Period/Dating: Undetermined
ITM: E 663236m, N 653543m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.629433, -7.065893
An archaeological assessment was carried out, on behalf of Gowran Community Council, of a site for ten single-storey dwellings and a day-care centre on the north side of Main Street. On the opposite side of the street to the south are the ruins of the fourteenth-century Collegiate Church of St Mary. The site measured 85m x 27m and consisted of the rear gardens of two long properties and part of an adjoining field. The boundary wall at the north end of the properties marks the limit of the medieval town as defined by the Urban Archaeological Survey.
Extensive test-trenching produced little evidence of activity on the site before the modern era. The soil profile overlying natural till was unusually deep, most noticeably on the west or downslope side of the site, where it reached a maximum depth of 1.25m. Since Main Street lies on a west-facing slope, it is probable that the original ground surfaces had been deliberately raised to create level areas or terraces for easy cultivation.
Test-trenches dug to investigate the boundary wall at the north end of the gardens showed that it was built from approximate present-day ground level and therefore was likely to be of relatively modern date. The wall was 0.5m wide with foundations built in a trench 0.65m deep, and it survived to a maximum height of 1.1 m.
A ditch uncovered 5.4m south of the boundary wall measured 4.7m in width and was excavated 1m into the till. The ditch lay below a soil build-up of 0.9–1.2m. The fill of the ditch was a uniform yellow-brown silty clay with occasional small (10mm) flecks of mortar and charcoal. A 0.25m-thick layer of rounded stones, 100–200mm in size, sloped into the ditch from the north side. No finds or inclusions of any description were observed in the fill to suggest a date for the ditch. The buried ditch, aligned east-west, is in line with property boundaries immediately to the west of the site and possibly marks the original northern end of the site in the medieval period. The sharp angle now defined by the stone boundary wall may be a later extension. There was no evidence for a wall or bank on the southern, i.e. town, side of the ditch.
6 St Ultans, Laytown, Drogheda, Co. Louth
