County: Waterford Site name: TANNERY, Dungarvan
Sites and Monuments Record No.: SMR 31:40 Licence number: 96E0306
Author: Dave Pollock
Site type: Historic town and Town defences
Period/Dating: Multi-period
ITM: E 626264m, N 593029m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.088562, -7.616743
The assessment of a large development site in front of the castle in Dungarvan found shallow stratigraphy and a great deal of post-medieval damage. The town wall was located, and an angle tower pinpointed.
Further excavations, ahead of the first stage of construction, investigated two areas on and beside the town wall.
In the trench to the north traces of medieval timber buildings or open-air structures were found on an old shingle beach. The structures had been damaged by the sea. The town wall and a C-shaped corner tower were built to seaward, close to the normal high-water mark, apparently towards the end of the seventeenth century. The ground behind the wall and inside the tower was immediately raised with a deep deposit of dumped shingle but was not overbuilt. A deep midden accumulated on the reclaimed ground before the wall was breached and buildings were erected to make use of an adjoining eighteenth-century quay.
The reclamation of more ground around the end of the eighteenth century/start of the nineteenth century resulted in serious truncation within the line of the wall and on the quay. Medieval layers were damaged and the town wall and tower were substantially robbed.
In the trench to the south a square tower was found cutthrough a shingle beach onto underlying clay close to the normal high-water mark. The tower probably controlled a gate at the seaward end of Quay Street (similar to the tower at the north gate, Fethard, Co. Tipperary). Pottery from construction infill suggests a late seventeenth-century date. The town wall heading north was subsequently attached to the tower, again cutinto the shingle beach around the normal high-water mark. Shingle was dumped behind the wall to raise the ground and was overlain with midden, as found in the other trench.
The area around the square tower was not truncated when more ground was reclaimed in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century, but serious damage has been inflicted on the east and south sides of the tower by the cutting of service trenches.
Further investigations ahead of development of other parts of the site will commence in January 1997 under licence 96E0378.
Rathduff, Fethard, Co. Tipperary
