1997:350 - LIMERICK: Court House Lane/River Lane/Glueyard Lane, Limerick

This site is located to the east of the medieval walled part of the Englishtown and may have been part of the precinct of St Francis’s Abbey. It is defined by the new Northern Relief Road, on the line of Court House Lane to the west, River Lane to the north and Glueyard Lane to the east. To the south is Flag Lane, with a dog-leg reaching out to Long Lane at the western end.

The two lanes to the north and south, River Lane and Long Lane, are probably of medieval origin as they lead to the town wall where Bonfields or Abbey Gate and Gaol Lane Gate respectively were located. Glueyard Lane presumably dates from the 19th century (a glue factory is marked on the 1870 OS map), and Court House Lane may date from the 18th century, when the Court House was constructed on the site of St Francis’s Friary.

The development consists of five blocks of one/two-storey houses, with a possible additional apartment block facing on to the new road at the corner of Long Lane and a single unit to the east of this. The line of Flag Lane will be continued to the new road. Four of the blocks will run east–west at right angles to the new road line, and the fifth will face westwards on to Glueyard Lane. Piled foundations are proposed.

The purpose of the work was to test the area of the proposed development in order to assess its impact on any structural remains of the priory.

The area of St Francis’s Abbey between Court House Lane and the westernmost house on Long Lane was excavated by F.M. Hurley as part of the archaeological work required for the Northern Relief Road (Excavations 1996, 69–70, 95E0218), and test-trenching in 1988 revealed walls and human skeletons. In the more recent excavation, structural remains consisting of three parallel walls extending east–west as well as c. 450 skeletons were excavated beneath the site of the Court House. The proportions and siting of these walls were interpreted by the excavator as being part of the west end of the friary church.

The friary was located to the north of Long Lane outside the town wall, which ran approx. north–south down Sheep Street to Gaol Lane Gate. The extent of the friary precincts, however, is uncertain. South of the Gate, a stretch of c. 30m of town wall has been identified in recent test-trenching (Excavations 1996, 70–1, 96E0213) and it may be that this was used as a precinct wall. The pictorial representation on the Hardiman map (1590) supports this theory. Gwynn and Hadcock (Medieval religious houses, Ireland (Irish Academic Press, 1988), 254) state that ‘at the general suppression the precincts contained a church, dormitory, cloister, hall, kitchen, three chambers and a garden of an acre’.

Core drilling was carried out by engineers, but the results did not show any structural remains.

The first test-trenching (Oct. 96), was carried out in two parts: five cuts, 1–5, were made on 24/10/96 on the area east of the proposed Northern Relief Road and were located to correspond with the proposed Phase 1 housing blocks, and eight cuttings, D–I, were dug by F.M. Hurley within the area of his excavation, three of which (Cuts D, E and I) were relevant to the area of proposed development. Further testing, Cuts 6–10, was carried out on 29/7/97. Of these, Cuts 8–10 were located on the east side of Glueyard Lane. Here the deposits all appeared to be made-up ground and not of archaeological interest. The final cuttings, 11 and 12, were opened on 5/11/97.

No friary-related structural remains were noted but there was evidence, from some of the trenches and from a hand-excavated area within the excavation, of a build-up of dark organic material at 2.6–1.5m OD, the level of natural clay. This material contained occasional finds and spreads of brushwood but no structures (wattle or otherwise), except in the hand-cut trench where the penultimate layer consisted of a cobbled surface, below which were upright stakes driven into the natural clay. Given the extra-mural location, it is possible that this organic material is town dump which accumulated in the area between the town wall and the Abbey River, resulting in its gradual reclamation prior to the foundation of the friary in 1267. It is also possible that the dark mixed soil identified in Cut 5 which overlay the organic may be related to the garden of the friary. In Cut 11, at the southern end of the tested area and closest to the extension eastwards of the church remains, human remains were identified at a depth of over 2m.

City Hall, Limerick