2000:0347 - SWORDS: Church Road, Dublin

Monitoring and test excavations were carried out at a site on the south side of Church Road, Swords, Co. Dublin, to assess whether archaeology previously located on site would be affected by the development. Pre-development testing had been carried out in March 1998 (Excavations 1998, 67–8). The site comprises c. 3000m2 of open ground situated in the town of Swords. On the other side of Church Road is an Early Christian monastic settlement and medieval church (SMR 11:34). The development site had previously been used as a quarry and a garden. The southern area of the site contained the foundations of a cottage, which was inhabited within living memory. The site had also once contained a number of greenhouses and a potting shed, which were associated with gardens and orchards.

The development consists of a three-storey school and hall with a games court and carpark. The east–west foundation trenches were excavated to bedrock (between 42.5m and 39m OD). Ground-beams were also placed in shallow trenches 0.52m deep across the site, and a lift shaft was excavated to bedrock (c. 42.1m OD). The investigation consisted of three phases: monitoring of topsoil-stripping, test excavation, and monitoring of the excavation of foundation trenches and associated groundworks.

Soil-stripping was carried out by a mechanical digger using a 2m-wide ditching bucket. An additional soil-strip over the area of the footprint of the building was undertaken to reduce the ground to a general build level of 44.4m OD. A number of features, mainly relating to the 18th/19th-century garden, were uncovered. Spreads of mortar and brick are the remains of greenhouses. A rectangular concrete trough measuring 1.2m by 2.2m was uncovered in the north of the site. Its walls were 0.2m thick, and its inside depth was 0.18m; the trough probably collected water for the garden. Evidence of two phases of quarrying in the south-western end of the site was also uncovered. Post-medieval quarrying was identified as a band of grey/brown soil with sharp stone inclusions. Below this a contrasting band of yellow, redeposited clay encloses the medieval quarried area.

Test excavation of the known archaeology, an area of rough, unmortared paving covered by a layer of shell-rich soil containing abraded sherds of medieval pottery, was carried out through the excavation of four cuttings (Areas 1–4), initially excavated using mechanical diggers. Once archaeology was encountered, investigation proceeded by hand.

An area of c. 7.5m x 6m was exposed, centred on Foundation Trench 2, which was to be dug to bedrock. Undisturbed archaeological features had been revealed here during the course of testing in 1998. Features now exposed consisted of a spread of this crude paving, extending over an area c. 5m x 2m, a hearth located to one side of the paving, with associated dumps of ash, and a second hearth also close to the paving, seen in the south-west section of Area 3. The paving consisted of rough slabs of undressed stone, c. 0.35m x 0.2m and usually 0.1–0.2m thick. Some larger stones, up to 0.8m long, were present. The stones overlay a soil that was a balanced, silty, sandy loam with shell fragments (F4). This material, from which fragments of medieval pottery and animal bone were recovered, appeared to be a general fill in the area and also continued above the paving and hearths.

A yellow marl was noted partly underlying and partly abutting the stones. This was similar to a redeposited clay noted overlying the medieval quarrying. The hearth, which lay to the north-west of the paving, was 1.3m x 0.8m and 0.28m thick. It had been edged with small stones, which ranged in length from 0.1m to 0.2m. These were set lengthways along the sides of the hearth, which sat in a slight depression in the soil. There was a considerable build-up of ash and charcoal lenses within the hearth, and several episodes of raking out the fire had resulted in adjacent dumps of ash. Some of these contained animal bone. A second possible hearth was uncovered in the north-facing section face of Area 3c, at the south-west side of the cutting. This consisted of a spread 1.1m wide and 0.3m deep. Three principal lenses of ash and charcoal were contained within it. On the west side of the cutting there was a discrete deposit of shell, which consisted principally of cockles and some mussels with roughly 10% charcoal-flecked, brown, silty soil.

All of these features were found below or at the build level of 44.4m OD. Finds from the vicinity of the features, some of which were from disturbed levels, indicated that the period to which they belonged was somewhere in the 12th to 14th centuries.

The final phase of the investigation consisted of the monitoring of the excavation of foundations, services and engineers’ test-trenches. Four test-pits were excavated around the perimeter of the site at its boundary with Church Road and along the southern end of the site at its boundary with Well Road. Testing was undertaken in areas peripheral to previous testing to determine the level and extent of archaeological deposits over a wider area of the site.

The pits were excavated to a depth of between 1.5m and 2.5m, to a maximum depth of 43.574m OD. Between four and seven layers were uncovered in each test-pit. In general, the top two layers corresponded with those from excavations in Areas 3 and 4. However, because of the nature of the deposition, the layers uncovered were not always similar to the features identified during the excavation of Areas 3 and 4.

Eight foundation trenches running north-west to south-east were to be excavated to bedrock. Before excavation commenced, the area of the building footprint had been reduced to 44.4m OD. The foundation trenches were excavated in 3m lengths before being filled with concrete in order to minimise the effect of collapse. The trench sides frequently collapsed as a result of the depth of the excavation, the height of the water-table and the unstable soils. As a consequence, close inspection of the foundation trench stratigraphy was often impossible. Observations were taken visually from a recommended safe distance of 3m from the excavation edge; depths were taken only when the ground condition permitted and at the terminals of the trenches. The trenches exposed bedrock at between 0.5m in the north-west and a maximum of 3.5m in the south-east. The stratigraphy generally consisted of discrete dumps of material sloping from west to east, conforming to the general findings from the excavation of Area 3 and 4.

Seven shallow trenches were excavated for ground-beams. The trenches were excavated from south-west to north-east, straddling the foundation trenches. All excavations were reduced to a level of 43.875m OD. No significant archaeological features were encountered. Finds included a bone toggle and two body sherds of medieval local ware dating to the 13th–15th centuries.

The lift shaft excavation consisted of a rectangular pit measuring 5m x 4.5m, dug 2.3m to a depth of 42.1m OD. The stratigraphy consisted of three principal layers: a pale brown clay, shell-flecked dark brown clay and a mortar-rich layer overlaying the bedrock. An 18th-century pantile fragment came from the shell-flecked, dark brown clay layer.

The power-line trench, c. 0.65m wide and 0.4m deep, ran from the vehicle entrance at Well Road and travelled parallel to the Ward River for a distance of 25.9m. It then turned towards the river for a further 4.6m. The entire trench showed signs of relatively recent disturbance, and much of it contained red brick and rubble corresponding with the remains of a cottage that stood on the site before being cleared during the engineers’ testing. A 2m length of disturbed cobblestones was uncovered midway along the trench. Finds included a 19th-century pottery rim found in a disturbed context.

The evidence recovered indicates that the site has been considerably modified, largely by quarrying activities but also by its use as a garden. There was no evidence for habitation in the prehistoric or historic periods, though there appears to have been some activity on the site from prehistoric times onwards. The earliest piece of evidence from the site is the shale stone axe rough-out, probably from a local source. It was not from an original context but clearly had been incorporated into a much later phase of activity.

Dumps of burnt stones, thickest at the northern side away from the river, and noted as F14 in Areas 3 and 4 and in some of the foundation trenches, have the appearance of stones from a fulacht fiadh. The burnt stones consisted of sandstones, similar to the stone in the adjacent outcrop.

There appear to have been two phases of outcrop quarrying. The stone used to build the nearby round tower, church, Old Vicarage and the wall surrounding the site could all have been derived from this. The other phase of quarrying appeared to be sealed by material (redeposited boulder clay), which is similar to that noted abutting the rough paving (F4a). As F4, which enclosed the paving, produced sherds of medieval pottery but no later finds, it is reasonable to suggest an early medieval date for this quarrying phase.

The activity noted in Areas 3 and 4 consisting of at least two hearths, and a third in Test-pit 2, does not represent any form of habitation. There was no evidence for any associated structures, and the fires appear to have been set in the open. The paving may simply have been a use of available materials to provide a secure, dry path underfoot. What activity was being carried out is unclear, though it is possible that it related to some of the quarrying or building work in the vicinity. The finds, principally the pottery, suggest a date somewhere in the 13th or 14th centuries. However, the antler comb fragment and the barrel padlock key could be indicative of slightly earlier activity. The barrel padlock key is of Type 1f (Donaghy 1998) and is dated to the 12th–14th centuries. Keys of this type occur from ecclesiastic, urban and medieval contexts in Ireland and are known from the excavations at Waterford among other places (ibid., 534).

The strata underlying the level on which the paving and hearths occurred consisted of deposits of stones, shell-rich loams, deposits of shell and a brown clay layer. Similar layers were recorded during the digging of the foundation trenches, though for reasons of safety these could not be examined in detail. The layers sloped downwards towards the river and had the appearance of fill brought in to level up the site, possibly incorporating material removed from the quarry face during the course of work.

During the course of the initial site investigations in 1998, disturbance to a depth of about 3m was recorded at the north-eastern end of the site. Here a trial-trench (Trench 5) produced a portion of an 18th-century creamware plate from about the 3m mark. One of the trial-trenches excavated by the engineers, Barrett Mahony Consultants, in 1995, was closer to the boundary with the Old Vicarage than Trench 5, and they noted rubble fill consistent with quarrying debris at a depth of up to 2.5m below the then surface.

Sometime, possibly in the late 17th or 18th centuries, after the building of the Old Vicarage, the final levelling of the site took place, and it was turned into a garden. Evidence for this in the form of cobbled paths was uncovered. The greenhouses and the various other garden features, the potting shed and the concrete trough were part of the ongoing use of the garden. In more recent times it was principally an orchard. The low wall retaining the riverbank was possibly built during this phase of activity.

Reference
Donaghy, C. 1998 Barrel padlocks and their keys. In M. Hurley and O. Scully (eds), Late Viking Age and medieval Waterford. Waterford.

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