County: Louth Site name: TULLYALLEN: Chapel Lane
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 99E0329
Author: Rosanne Meenan
Site type: Excavation - miscellaneous
Period/Dating: Modern (AD 1750-AD 2000)
ITM: E 704296m, N 777711m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.738598, -6.419075
A condition of planning permission required a site assessment before development. The development site was c. 80m east of the site of a late medieval church (SMR 24:1) surrounded by a graveyard, which may be built on the site of an earlier church. There are four holy water stoups in the graveyard (SMR 24:2:4), which may also be late medieval.
Two trenches tested the locations of the front and back walls of the proposed bungalow. In both trenches black garden soil overlay a grey/brown, silty material that produced fragments of brick and a sherd of black-glazed pottery, thereby suggesting an earliest date of the late 18th century. Natural was an orange/brown, stony boulder clay, and no archaeological features or artefacts were observed.
The grey/brown, silty material may have been laid down to provide a level surface in this location-the laneway to the west slopes down from north to south, while the development site is flat, suggesting that the site had been levelled artificially. This proposition is further strengthened by the fact that the grey/brown, silty material was deeper in Trench 1, at the south of the site. The previous landowner informed the writer that similar levelling had been carried out when an orchard was cleared about 25 years ago.
The spoil from the trenches was examined, but no material from any period earlier than the late 18th/19th century was observed.
Roestown, Drumree, Co. Meath
