County: Dublin Site name: DUBLIN: 16 Meath Street
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 00E0737
Author: Finola O’Carroll, Cultural Resource Development Services Ltd.
Site type: House - 17th/18th century
Period/Dating: Post Medieval (AD 1600-AD 1750)
ITM: E 714602m, N 733772m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.341756, -6.279014
Test-trenching was undertaken in advance of a four-storey apartment/shop development. Meath Street is situated in the Liberties of Dublin, close to the eastern boundary of St Thomas’s Abbey. It was laid out in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The pit of the cellar of the existing building was cut into natural subsoil so that evidence for earlier occupation was confined to the back yard of the site.
Testing at the site revealed the remains of a redbrick-cellared house, a thick layer of garden soil of post-medieval date, and several lower layers of uncertain date. This earlier undated occupation consisted of two 0.2m-thick layers of rich, organic clay containing some shell, which overlay natural subsoils, at a depth of 2.4m below the present yard level. They were overlain by a 0.4m-thick layer of redeposited natural subsoil, which is probably related to the construction of a post-medieval house, as it is overlaid by a 0.4m-thick layer of garden soil, containing smashed pottery of 17th- or early 18th-century date. The cellar was cut through the top of this layer, which was covered by redeposited natural upcast and several garden layers and yard surfaces relating to the cellared house.
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