County: Louth Site name: CARLINGFORD: Station Road
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 96E0315
Author: Kieran Campbell
Site type: Quay
Period/Dating: Modern (AD 1750-AD 2000)
ITM: E 720879m, N 809162m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 54.017497, -6.155448
The site for three townhouses is located on the eastern side of Carlingford town at Station Road, also known as Old Quay Lane. Three test-pits produced similar results, indicating that the site is on land reclaimed during the nineteenth century, probably in connection with the building of the railway in the 1870s. Under garden soil, up to 0.5m thick, loose stone rubble was exposed which had every appearance of material brought straight from a quarry. In two of the test-pits the stone fill continued below the limit of excavation at a depth of 1.3m. In the third test-pit a hard, compact, stony surface was encountered at a depth of 1.2m below the garden surface.
A print of late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century date shows that the old shore follows what is now the line of Station Road/Old Quay Lane. The stony surface uncovered in one test-pit is probably a metalled surface associated with the old shoreline or quay. Excavations by Gleeson and Moore in 1992 on a site directly across the lane, i.e. west of the present site, revealed shore gravels under modern landfill (Excavations 1992, 45; County Louth Archaeological Journal (1992)).
6 St Ultans, Laytown, Drogheda
