1996:213 - KILKENNY: New Building Lane, Kilkenny

NMI Burial Excavation Records

County: Kilkenny Site name: KILKENNY: New Building Lane

Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 96E0310

Author: Edmond O'Donovan for Margaret Gowen and Co. Ltd.

Site type: Excavation - miscellaneous

Period/Dating: Modern (AD 1750-AD 2000)

ITM: E 650319m, N 656123m

Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.653971, -7.256296

Monitoring and archaeological test excavation was carried out on a site at New Building Lane, Kilkenny, on 15 November 1996 to fulfil a condition of planning permission. The site, located at the northern end of Hightown on a laneway off Parliament Street, is rectangular, measuring 20m east-west and 8m north-south. The southern end of the town, centred on the Grand Parade, is thought to be the focus of the earliest Anglo-Norman settlement. Hightown expanded in the medieval period to enclose the land presently occupied by New Building Lane. A number of important buildings dating from the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries survive around the lane.

Detailed inspection of existing buildings was carried out and concluded that no medieval or Tudor architectural features were preserved in the fabric of the existing structures on the site. However, the location of the site between New Building House on its western side and a late sixteenth/early seventeenth-century building immediately to its east led to a requirement for the archaeological monitoring of the demolition of the later structures between the two important early buildings.

The eastern site boundary comprised a portion of the external wall of the late sixteenth/early seventeenth-century Tudor house which remains in situ. Demolition of later abutting walls facilitated the inspection of hidden early features in the Tudor wall. A blocked doorway was revealed below the remains of a first-floor dressed limestone chamfered window. The doorway is surmounted by a single limestone lintel resting on roughly cut limestone sidestones; the northern side of the doorway is missing.

The western site boundary is one wall of New Building House, an eighteenth-century dwelling with an ornate cur-stone frontage whose east gable wall forms the western site boundary. The walls of this property remain in situ.Two trial-trenches were excavated on the site after demolition works. The trenches revealed between 1m and 0.5m of rubble on the site, overlying occasional deposits of a post-medieval grey charcoal-flecked clay which produced one sherd of brownware. No archaeological soils, features or deposits were revealed.

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