County: Louth Site name: CARLINGFORD: Tholsel Street
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 97E0141
Author: Kieran Campbell
Site type: House - medieval
Period/Dating: Multi-period
ITM: E 718813m, N 811630m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 54.040145, -6.185985
Testing was carried out on 14 January 1998 on a site in Tholsel Street, Carlingford, where planning permission had been granted for a commercial and residential development. The site lies on the west side of Tholsel Street between The Tholsel, a medieval gatehouse, and The Mint, a medieval stone house that is a National Monument in state care. The site has a street frontage of 27m and extends westwards for 21m, cutting back into a natural gravel ridge.
In a series of test-trenches modern and post-medieval rubble was excavated by machine to expose the surface of archaeological deposits. Thereafter excavation of a very limited nature was carried out by hand to assess the nature of the deposits and to retrieve evidence of date. The archaeological deposits consisted of stone walls and house floors ranging in date from the medieval period to the early 19th century. The deposits were uncovered at a depth of 0.5m below present street level and extended up to 4m from the street front. Natural gravel was exposed at ground level over the western part of the site.
Pottery of post-medieval date and iron slag was recovered from the upper floor levels. At the northern end of the site an oxidised clay floor appeared to be of early 18th-century date. A black, greasy soil containing charcoal, ash and frequent oyster and limpet shells overlay the floor. These deposits resemble those recorded by Gleeson and Moore in excavations on the opposite side of the street (CLAJ 1992). Four sherds of 13th–14th-century local ware were recovered from a floor deposit exposed at a depth of 0.5m towards the south end of the site.
Examined in a 0.3m x 0.4m test-pit midway along the front of the site, the deposits were shown to have an overall thickness of 0.45m. In the test-pit three deposits of shell- and charcoal-flecked soil were interleaved with 50mm-thick layers of clean gravel. No dating evidence was recovered from these earliest levels.
As a result of the archaeological investigations the foundations in the area of the archaeological deposits were redesigned as a raft construction.
6 St Ultans, Laytown, Drogheda, Co. Louth
