1999:720 - TRIM: Mill Street/High Street/Haggard Street, Meath

Monitoring of a new ground-water pipe through Mill Street, High Street and Haggard Street, Trim, was carried out from April to August 1999. Along much of the route of the pipeline an old, roughly cobbled or metalled street surface could be traced, varying in depth from c. 0.2m to almost 1.5m beneath the present street surface. This layer varied in its precise composition but was generally characterised by angular stones lying in a compact matrix of red/brown, sandy clay with inclusions of animal bone and oyster shell. It was generally 0.1–0.2m thick and lay directly upon the natural, following a horizontal course wherever it occurred. On Mill Street and lower High Street this layer was sometimes underlain by a silty, grey/brown layer, which also followed a horizontal course and appeared to be closely and possibly functionally related to it. There was little doubt about the contemporanity of this layer where it occurred on Mill Street and High Street, although its continuity was occasionally broken by services.

This stony layer was sometimes overlain by a deep archaeological deposit that was in turn truncated by modern road construction. This deposit was a dark, silty, organic layer that tended to produce fragments of timber, straw and leather and occasionally sherds of medieval pottery. This dark, organic layer was in turn regularly overlain by a brown, clayey gravel. It is likely that these layers represent an episode of deliberate street-heightening.

At the junction of High Street and Haggard Street these layers became quite uniform in character. The stony layer interpreted as an old street surface occurred here at c. 1.4m beneath the present road surface and was generally overlain by 0.2–0.3m of silty, organic material. A short distance beyond the southern end of Haggard Street a substantial pit was cut through by the pipe-trench. This pit measured c. 3m in diameter and was not fully bottomed by the service trench, which extended to a depth of over 2m. It was unclear whether this pit post-dated or pre-dated the cobbled layer.

Immediately north of this pit a linear arrangement of roughly dressed stone, 2.15m long, was observed on the east side of the trench at a depth of 1.1m beneath the present ground surface. The cobbled layer was not clearly discernible in the vicinity of this stone arrangement, but the evidence indicates that it occurred at c. 1.7m below the present street surface in the general area. The cobbled layer continued northwards up Haggard Street, where it was associated with deeper archaeological deposits that became the subject of an excavation (see No. 715, Excavations 1999). These deposits comprised four separate and subsequent layers of a metalled or cobbled road surface interspersed with episodes of deliberate road-heightening, over a combined depth of almost 2m, as well as the remains of two masonry walls and a number of pre-road formation gullies. It is believed that the more widespread cobbled surface, as observed during monitoring in other parts of the town, is related to the second-earliest road surface examined during the archaeological excavation (Road Surface 2). Towards the northern end of Haggard Street, beyond the limit of the excavation, this layer could again be identified lying upon the natural and covered by a thin spread of black, silty material. These layers petered out just south of the junction of Haggard Street and Logan Street, but a layer of modern cobbles was intermittently visible for the remainder of the pipe-trench to the north, which continued a short distance out the Kildalkey, Athboy and Kells roads.

A well was encountered towards the northern end of High Street. This was post-medieval in date. Its cut clearly truncated the layers described above, and its upper courses were overlain directly by the modern road formation, suggesting that it may have been truncated during this event. Another well was encountered on Haggard Street, which again post-dated the archaeological layers.

At the western end of Mill Street the remains of two stone-and-mortar walls were tentatively identified. Both were aligned at a right angle to the line of the street, but they clearly post-dated any archaeological layers in the area. Neither wall appeared to have been very substantial.

31 Millford, Athgarvan, Co. Kildare