1997:566 - DUNGARVAN: Castle Street/Quay Street, Waterford

Following testing and excavations on the line of the town wall in late 1996 (Excavations 1996, 111), four areas were excavated in early 1997 in the footprint of proposed buildings.

‘Garvans Church’ (not a church but a two-storeyed hall or townhouse of the late medieval/early post-medieval period) survives between two of the areas.

The west end of the building overlies a metalled surface representing an earlier version of Castle Street, but there is no sign of buildings beside this road. Building starts with Garvans Church, probably in the 16th century, and continues with a collection of wooden sheds and workshops attached to its west gable and spreading along the present roadside. Clay-extraction pits were cut behind the buildings and to the west. By the late 18th century the workshops had been replaced by a terrace of cottages.

East of Garvans Church the ground was badly damaged by clay pits underlying 18th-century houses and 19th-century lime-kilns. The corner of a small clay-floored timber building over an infilled clay pit may be late medieval, but probably does not pre-date the construction of Garvans Church.

Remains of a fulacht fiadh survived, riddled with later clay pits. A calibrated date of AD 540–660 (2 sigma range) was derived from associated charcoal (UB-4159).

A large and a small area were investigated on the north side of Quay Street. The earliest street appears to be late 17th/early 18th-century, associated with a tower and gate on the contemporary town wall. The earliest buildings are stone-walled, some built over shallow open clay pits (backfilled during construction) and some quarried for clay inside and backfilled. The buildings, standing in the 18th century (and probably built then), formed a double row beside the street. Most had disappeared by the mid-19th century.

Arbour Hill, Fethard, Co. Tipperary