1998:132 - CASTLE STREET/ULVERTON ROAD, Dalkey, Dublin

This site, at the corner of Castle Street and Ulverton Road, is immediately adjacent to the recorded site of one of Dalkey's urban tower-house castles. The proposed development involved the refurbishment of a two-storey retail building and the construction of an extension covering its entire rear garden. The building survey found that the existing building was 19th century in date and incorporated no earlier fabric.

Two test-trenches revealed that undulating bedrock lay very close to the surface right across most of the site but that it shelved away quite steeply towards its eastern boundary. The garden had been created by filling the deep clefts in the rock with rubble and then raising the level (relative to the street level) by the introduction of garden soil. At the north-eastern corner of the site the bedrock surface lay 700–800mm below street level, rising sharply to just 300mm in a westerly direction; it broke the surface at the south of the site. The surface of the lower portion of rock exposed possessed the very scant remains of a highly compacted, yellow shell-mortar adhering to it. The mortar of the rubble fill was a sandy, grey/white mortar. With the similar Goat's Castle built on bedrock, and with no other evidence of any medieval activity whatsoever, this very thin layer of mortar was the only evidence on the site to suggest that a medieval structure (founded on bedrock-and completely cleared after demolition) may have extended into the north-eastern extremity of the site.

2 Killiney View, Albert Road Lower, Glenageary, Co. Dublin