1997:391 - DUNDALK: Laurels Road, Louth

The site is located on Laurels Road, an L-shaped street which runs west from Church Street opposite the medieval St Nicholas’s Church. The medieval town defences on the west side of Dundalk followed a line now marked by the boundary of Townparks townland and by the north–south portion of Laurels Road. The development consisted of a three-storey block of apartments fronting onto Laurels Road on the south, with a paved entrance to Laurels Road on the west. The site overall measured 40m east–west by 22m north–south. The apartment block had dimensions of 22m east–west by 16m north–south.

Three test-trenches excavated by machine indicated that similar stratigraphy existed across the entire site. The modern concrete surface of the former workshops and yard overlay a series of earlier surfaces composed of stone, gravel, clay and industrial waste material. These surfaces accounted for the uppermost 0.55–0.7m of the deposits and were of 19th- and 20th-century date.

Deposits at lower levels consisted of grey soils containing few stones and with the refuse of domestic habitation, i.e. charcoal, shells, animal bones and pottery, scattered through the deposits. The deposits ranged in depth from 0.55m to 1.9m below the present ground surface and overlay natural clay. Towards the surface the deposits are dark grey in colour, quite firm, and contain a moderate quantity of red brick inclusions and pottery datable to the late 17th and early 18th centuries. With increasing depth the deposits become softer and wetter and contain noticeably fewer inclusions. There is also a colour change from dark to light grey. The small number of pottery sherds recovered from the lowermost levels, i.e. from 1–1.9m below present ground surface, were of 14th/15th-century date.

It was concluded that the deposits represented a continuous build-up of garden soils during the medieval and post-medieval periods. Owing to the soft ground conditions the apartment block was constructed on pile foundations.