1997:072 - DOWNPATRICK: Denvir's Hotel, English Street, Down

In 1988 the discovery of the blocked-up, original north-west corner fireplace during renovations to this listed building, reputedly a coaching inn of 1642, was followed by brief excavations beneath the floor of the bar, yielding medieval pottery (Excavations 1988, 13–14). Analysis of the building showed its historic core to be a rectangular stone building, its gable end facing English Street to the north, and that the hotel's kitchen stove probably blocked another large fireplace.

As part of major renovations during 1996–7 the kitchen was relocated, and the supervised extraction of the stove and its flues, and plaster-stripping, revealed a large fireplace (9ft [2.74m] wide, 5ft [1.52m] high, to the base of the bressumer, and 3ft [1.07m] deep) of stone with a roughly coursed brick hood supported on a built-in oak bressumer (both of which had been damaged by later fireplace/stove insertions). The stone chimney, essentially a void within the long west wall of the building, rose intact to modern roof level. It was not joined by an upper-floor hearth/chimney. A rectangular, tile-lined ash-pit (3ft [0.91m] by 1ft [0.26m]) had been set into the hearth's clay/rubble floor. Limited excavations beneath the floor of the kitchen found no earlier floors, coming on to a thin soil layer (pre-1642 topsoil?) over bedrock. A single bodysherd of local medieval pottery was recovered.

A small cubical recess or oven had been incorporated into the north side of the hearth. Its ash fill (presumably from last use) contained fragments of several bottle corks, twig tapers and a tiny fragment of printed paper, perhaps used as a spill. The typeface on the paper showed speech marks and the word Penang. The reverse bears lines from an indecipherable illustration or endpiece design. There is no visible watermark. Typeface research and this text suggest that the fragment may come from a 1790–1820 Irish 'chapbook' (light fiction/digest). Penang was established as a British military base from 1796.

Surveillance of the hotel renovation, which included much internal plaster-stripping, revealed several original first-floor window openings and the original gable-end front door, all blocked. A second, north-west corner hearth, which had shared the ground-floor chimney shaft, was noted at first-floor level, albeit much destroyed. It seems likely that, at ground-floor level, the original inn comprised a public bar entered directly from English Street, with kitchen/dining rooms beyond.

5–33 Hill Street, Belfast