County: Cork Site name: RED ABBEY, Cork
Sites and Monuments Record No.: RMP 74:41 Licence number: 00E0618
Author: Maurice F. Hurley and Máire Ní Loingsigh, Cork Corporation
Site type: Religious house - Dominican friars
Period/Dating: Multi-period
ITM: E 567503m, N 571439m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 51.894163, -8.472152
Excavation in advance of upgrading works at the public amenity area surrounding the Red Abbey Tower took place in November 2000. The crossing tower of the church is all that remains above ground of the Red Abbey. The tower is built in an architectural style typical of the 14th century, indicating that it was a later addition to the 13th-century Augustinian friary.
The earliest reference to this Augustinian foundation occurs in the will of the Cork merchant John de Wynchedon, dated 1306. At the Dissolution, the friary buildings included a church (chancel, two chapels), a dormitory, a hall, a buttery, a kitchen, a cloister, six rooms and six cellars. The last known use of the abbey buildings was in the second half of the 18th century when it was used as a sugar-house.
Three test-trenches were excavated. Trench 1 extended north–south across the presumed axis of the nave; no walls were located in this trench. Human bone was exposed at 0.7m, and excavation ceased at this level. There were at least two burials in the trench. The east–west-aligned inhumations were within a layer of red/brown, sandy clay that had been cut in the 18th/19th century by a drain and by a trench filled with rubble and broken slate.
In Trench 2, located to the north-west of the tower, 18th/19th-century drainage and building had disturbed the medieval levels to depths of between 0.6m and 0.85m. Human bone was found in the disturbed levels. A stone-lined grave containing an articulated skeleton and the long bones of at least two other individuals is comparable to graves found at the 1993 excavation at the Dominican priory at Crosses Green, Cork, and dated to the late 14th to mid-16th centuries. Two other burials were found in red/brown, sandy clay, a layer that seems to be medieval in date. Similar sandy clay yielded a human tooth and the rimsherd of a 13th/14th-century Saintonge pitcher.
In Trench 3, to the north-east of the tower, two abutting post-medieval walls? and a well of 18th/19th-century date were recorded. The cut for the well contained large amounts of 18th/19th-century red earthenware pottery of a type found in excavations at Red Abbey Yards in 1992 (Sheehan 1993 and Excavations 1992, 9). Two sherds of green-glazed Saintonge ware were recovered from 18th/19th-century levels in this trench. Disturbed human bone was found in layers associated with burning and industrial debris. An east–west limestone wall set in red/brown sand, which had been cut by construction of the well, may be a medieval structure.
No trace of the medieval abbey walls were found during this excavation.
References
Hurley, M.F. and Sheehan, C.M. 1995 Excavations at the Dominican priory, St Mary’s of the Isle, Cork.
Sheehan, C. 1993 Red Abbey Yards. In B.S. Nenk, S. Margeson and M. Hurley (eds), Medieval Britain and Ireland in 1992, 292. Medieval Archaeology Vol. XXXVII.
City Hall, Cork
