County: Kilkenny Site name: KILKENNY: Abbey View, New Building Lane
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 97E0130
Author: Thaddeus C. Breen, for Valerie J. Keeley Ltd.
Site type: Excavation - miscellaneous
Period/Dating: Multi-period
ITM: E 650318m, N 656123m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.653967, -7.256302
Monitoring was carried out when foundations for new houses were being excavated. The site was bounded on one side by the city wall, and was inside the wall. The ground level dropped sharply to the west, outside the wall, and to the north. The site was previously occupied by a house built in the 1930s and its garden. On 18th- and 19th-century maps it was shown as gardens.
Topsoil-stripping and foundation-digging revealed a layer of dark organic soil varying in thickness from 0.3m at the southern end of the site to over 0.75m at the northern end. This contained a large amount of modern pottery, glass and other refuse, including two dog skeletons. There was also slag from a nearby ironworks. The only older finds from this layer were two sherds of medieval pottery and part of a human pelvis.
Below the dark brown layer was a natural gravel layer which sloped down to the west: the surface of the garden had obviously been built up to make it level. The presence of a human bone suggests that soil may have been brought from the area immediately to the west, where part of the graveyard of the Black Abbey was uncovered in recent excavations.
13 Wainsfort Crescent, Dublin 6W
