County: Dublin Site name: DUBLIN: Gascoigne Home, Camden Row
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 01E0018
Author: Franc Myles, Margaret Gowen & Co. Ltd.
Site type: No archaeology found
Period/Dating: N/A
ITM: E 715403m, N 733186m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.336319, -6.267208
The Gascoigne Nursing Home was established as a hospice for elderly members of the Church of Ireland in 1900. The site is being redeveloped with a scheme of several ‘town houses’. This initial phase of testing involved the mechanical excavation of two trenches in the walled garden to the rear of the building and behind properties on Camden Row, Heytesbury Street and Pleasants Street. A second phase of testing is subject to a separate planning application and will take place after the demolition of the nursing home. The testing was requested owing to the proximity of the development site to the medieval parish church of St Kevin. The work was undertaken on 17 January.
Despite its proximity to St Kevin’s Church, the proposed development site would appear to have been undeveloped until the 1820s, when the southern side of Camden Row was built upon and Heytesbury Street was broken through, linking the Grand Canal Basin with Bride Street. Previous maps of the area, including those by Charles Brooking (1728) and John Rocque (1756), depict a kink on Long Lane (Camden Row) at the site of the Gascoigne Home. Rocque depicts gardens on the north side of the lane and an enclosed field on the site where the testing took place. The site is within the Liberty of St Sepulchre and is reputed to have housed the archbishop’s marshalsea. If this is the case, the small building depicted by Rocque may be the remains of the prison and the site is probably more correctly located at the junction of the four streets (Long Lane, New Bride Street, Camden Row and Heytesbury Street).
A similar stratigraphical sequence was recorded in both trenches, where a layer of modern garden soil overlay a deposit of building debris, which in turn overlay garden soil over natural subsoil. An examination of the brick fragments within the debris layer would suggest that it comes from the construction of the Gascoigne Home, as opposed to the surrounding terraces of early Victorian housing. None of the deposits were of archaeological significance.
2 Killiney View, Albert Road Lower, Glenageary, Co. Dublin
