2000:0311 - KILMAINHAM: Royal Hospital, Dublin

Monitoring of engineers’ test-trenches within the main courtyard of the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, took place on 24 January 2000. Plans to pave the main central courtyard of the Royal Hospital commenced with five engineers’ test-trenches.

The Royal Hospital was built in 1680, though the site has a long history. Kilmainham derives its name from an early medieval monastery site founded by St Maignenn, which probably functioned here in the 7th and 8th centuries. It is believed that a site—close to the current Royal Hospital and in the same location as the church of St Maignenn—was granted to the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem by Richard Fitz Gilbert (de Clare), known as Strongbow, in 1174. The first prior, Hugh, commissioned a priory and hospital with substantial gardens to be built, with the entire site to be surrounded by stone walls and four towers.

The Kilmainham/Islandbridge area is well known for its Viking burials, and a great many Viking finds are recorded from the area. In Boe’s work on Viking finds from Great Britain and Ireland, a large percentage of Viking stray finds from Dublin are provenanced to Kilmainham (Boe 1940). Wallace (1990) suggests that, as a considerable number of archaeological finds from the cemetery mentioned above are both domestic and military in nature, the community represented was not only a military but also a settled population.

The work consisted of digging five trenches using a small digger in the main courtyard of the Royal Hospital. Each of the five test-pits was c. 1.5m x 2m and a maximum depth of 3m. The excavation of each pit was monitored for archaeological layers beneath the imported gravel layer, which forms the present courtyard surface. Each pit showed consistent layers beneath the courtyard surface. Beneath an imported, yellow, sandy gravel layer and a geotextile mesh (courtyard surface), there appeared to be a rubble layer with some redbrick and stone inclusions. Beneath this again was a black limestone and humic layer containing crushed redbrick pieces and stone inclusions. Underlying this layer was a brown, sandy clay layer with some decayed limestone inclusions; this layer overlay a disturbed mortar layer, which indicated an earlier modern building layer. This mortar layer was directly over the natural, mid-brown, silty clay subsoil.

The test-pits did not reveal any archaeological finds or features. On examination of excavated spoil, no finds of any kind were uncovered.

References
Boe, J. 1940 Norse antiquities in Ireland. In H. Shetelig (ed.), Viking antiquities in Great Britain and Ireland. Part III. Oslo.
Wallace, P. 1990 The origins of Dublin. In H. Clarke (ed.), Medieval Dublin. Dublin.