2001:1205 - CASHEL: 29 Main Street, Tipperary

To assess the impact of proposed extensions to Garvey’s Supervalu supermarket, two test-trenches were cut in the yard behind the standing building at 29 Main Street, and a third was cut in the carpark to the rear of the present supermarket. Indications of medieval buildings were found behind 29 Main Street, but the carpark area had been thoroughly truncated during construction of the main supermarket.

Most of the footprint of the proposed extension behind 29 Main Street was investigated, as one large excavation. Towards the north (towards the street) a sequence of buildings represented occupation from the high medieval period to the construction of the standing roadside building in the late 18th/early 19th century.

The earliest building was rectangular or subrectangular (with only one corner in the trench, and that damaged by a later pit). It may have been walled with unsupported clay (no wicker frame) or with a timber frame resting on the ground. It was not aligned with the present Main Street.

A second building on the same site appears to have been wide (5.5–6m) and timber-framed on a mortared and clay-bonded stone footing c. 0.4m high. Part of the roof was slated.

This building aligned neatly with the present Main Street, and was replaced in time with another, with more substantial mortared stone walls. The later building, potentially stone-walled and perhaps post-medieval, was provided at some stage with a cesspit. This pit and three others have produced useful assemblages of post-medieval bottle glass and pottery.

Towards the rear of the site, 18th-century buildings overlay infilled clay pits, cultivation soil, and the fragmentary remains of a substantial mortared stone wall. The wall is medieval, and aligns with the property boundaries on Main Street. It is over 1m wide, and might be part of an early town boundary enclosing properties on medieval John Street, running at right angles to Main Street.

Knockrower Road, Stradbally, Co. Waterford