County: Wexford Site name: CORNMARKET, Wexford
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 00E0241
Author: Joanna Wren, for ADS Ltd.
Site type: Historic town
Period/Dating: Multi-period
ITM: E 704703m, N 622023m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.339812, -6.463458
The site is on the east side of the junction between Cornmarket and Abbey Street, Wexford, 32m inside the stretch of town wall between John’s Gate and George’s Street. A ‘Market Street’, probably Cornmarket, is mentioned in the Common Pleas Roll of 1280 (Hore 1900–11, 92). Along with Patrick’s Square and Main Street itself, it was one of the principal marketplaces of the town and was reputedly the site of a market cross (Bradley and King [n.d.], 156). Abbey Street is the natural route from Selskar Abbey to the market and probably evolved shortly after the abbey’s foundation in the early 13th century. It was originally called Selskar Street and is first mentioned in the 1662 Book of the Valuation of Wexford.
The building east of the site (now Tom Moore’s Tavern) has architectural features that suggest that part of it dates to the 17th century (P. Ruane, pers. comm.). These include a corner fireplace and the haphazard development of its ground-plan.
The Ordnance Survey map of 1882 shows six properties fronting onto Abbey Street in the area of the site and five onto Cornmarket. Behind these properties are substantial yard areas. The site was occupied until April 2000 by retail and commercial units dating to the late 1980s. These buildings were demolished immediately prior to testing.
Archaeological deposits survived well throughout the eastern three-quarters of the site, where the subsoil was lowest, with some intermittent disturbance from post-medieval and modern features. More sporadic survival of deposits occurred in a band 5m wide running east–west along the western limit of the excavation, where the natural subsoil often rose to the level of the modern ground surface and the archaeological deposits survived in pockets in between. Here too there was significant disturbance from later buildings on the street front.
The largest single deposit was a grey, sandy silt 21m north–south by 11m, which seems to have covered much of the eastern three-quarters of the site. Most of this layer seemed intact, having suffered only intermittent disturbance from the 18th- and 19th-century buildings on the street frontages and modern wall foundations. The nature and location of this silt would suggest that it was some sort of back-yard occupation debris. The pottery recovered from it suggested a 15th-century date (C. McCutcheon, pers. comm.).
Along the western and southern perimeter of the site, in the area of the street frontages, the deposits were truncated by the cellars and foundations of 18th- and 19th-century buildings. The surviving deposits are probably the remains of decayed occupation debris, either deposited in a yard area or from within a house. The lens of ash and oxidised clay in the silt in the south-west corner of the site is probably rake-out from a hearth. The pottery recovered from these levels dated to the 13th and 14th centuries (C. McCutcheon, pers. comm.), and the remains of 13th/14th-century houses fronting onto Abbey Street may survive in the western part of the site. In the south-east corner a black silt seemed to be the remains of debris from metalworking, and a small pit set in the yellow clay may be part of a furnace set in the yard area of a property fronting onto Abbey Street.
References
Bradley, J. and King, H. [n.d.] Urban Archaeology Survey. County Wexford. Unpublished report, OPW.
Hore, P.H. 1900–11 History of the town and county of Wexford (6 vols). London.
The Mile Post, Waterford
