1998:351 - KILKENNY: Bridge House, John Street, Kilkenny

The final phase of an archaeological assessment was carried out on a development site in Kilkenny in February 1998. Five test-trenches were excavated. The site lies on the eastern bank of the River Nore adjacent to and immediately beside St John's Bridge. The suburb is an extension of the main medieval town (Hightown) on the western side of the Nore. This suburb grew up around St John's Priory, which moved to its present location in 1325.

John Street is the central axis from which the suburb was laid out (Lanigan, K. and Tyler, G., Kilkenny, its architecture and history, 1987). This continued into the Tudor period, when large stone houses were built. With the redevelopment of the street over the past 400 years many of these buildings have been removed or altered. However, Nos 78/81, the 17th-century residence of a branch of the Fitzgeralds and Shees, survives, as well as Nos 88/89 (Bridge House, the Dower House of the Ormond family).

The earliest recorded mentions of town walling around the suburb of St John's occur in the early 16th century, when there are references to a stone and lime wall, with reference to a turret in 1570 (Thomas, A., The walled towns of Ireland, 1992). The suburb is mentioned in Cromwell's account of the siege of Kilkenny in 1650: 'Having possessed the Irishtown, and there being another walled town on the other side of the river (St John's); eight companies of foot were sent over to possess that'. The town wall was evidently in existence from at least the mid-16th century and continued in use through to the end of the 17th century.

The line of the town wall has been discussed in detail by J. Bradley (The town wall of Kilkenny, Old Kilkenny Review, parts I and II, 1975–6) and A. Thomas (The walled towns of Ireland, 1992). They both speculated, based on Rocque's map, that the town wall ran along the eastern boundary of the development site. The wall has been positively identified at the north-eastern corner of the suburb. It extends from a small mural tower on Maudlin Street, along the rear property plots of John Street, where it stood at the rear of Nos 68/69 (O'Donovan, E., Unpublished archaeological assessment report, 1997).

A section of wall enclosing the suburban precinct of St John's was identified in Trench D. It stood 24m south of and parallel to John Street, was 0.43m wide and lined the western edge of a ditch. The wall was 0.19m deep on its western side and 1.7m deep on its eastern side, where it displayed a characteristic basal batter. The ditch outside the wall was 2.5m wide, 0.8m deep and cut into natural boulder clay. The basal 0.3m of the ditch was filled with poorly humified organic material, containing occasional fragments of red brick. A deposit of grey clay, 0.5m thick, sealed this. A thick mantle of demolition rubble made up of mortar, red brick and stone sealed all of the features in the trench.

Throughout the assessment a significant number of trenches were excavated in the rear gardens of Nos 85–89 John Street. It was thought that the town wall ran along the south-eastern property boundary of the site (Thomas, ibid. and Bradley, ibid.); however, owing to the identification of the town wall in Trench D, it now appears that the wall is significantly further north-west. The soil profiles recorded in all of the archaeological trenches (apart from Trench D (this assessment) and Trenches 12, 13i and 13ii (previous assessment by Margaret Gowen, Excavations 1995, 49–50) are modern and insignificant. This area can be considered as a river flood-plain that acted as a fallow area outside the town wall in the medieval period, which could be readily defended from the town wall.

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