2002:0281 - CORK: Main Street North/Liberty Street, Cork

Test-trenching took place in the carpark of St Francis’s Church in March 2002. The L-shaped site is in the medieval city, between North Main Street and Liberty Street.

Four trenches were excavated in the location of proposed services.

There was no archaeological material in Trench I, which was excavated close to the walls of the modern church. Two further trenches (II and III) contained post-medieval material over a thick layer of organic clay. This organic layer was a minimum of 1m thick and extended beyond the excavated depth (1.8m) of the trenches.

Trench IV was 28m long and extended from North Main Street west toward the church. Post-medieval walls were recorded in the upper levels in this trench. An organic layer c. 1.1m thick (also seen in Trenches II and III) extended beyond the excavated depth of the trench (2.2m). This layer contained sherds of 13th-/14th-century pottery and the sole of a leather shoe.

An area at the eastern end of the trench, near the modern street, contained an east–west-aligned row of stakes and some wattle, associated with a layer of compacted organic material. These features may be part of a house fronting onto North Main Street, the main thoroughfare of medieval Cork. They may also represent a boundary fence dividing two burgage plots or mark the edge of a property fronting onto Broad Lane. (This lane was one of the main east–west thoroughfares in the medieval city and remained in existence until the building of the new St Francis’s Church in the early 1950s.) Such property boundaries were excavated at Christ Church, South Main Street, in the 1980s (Cleary et al. 1997, 73, 75), and a possible example was also excavated by Catryn Power in South Main Street during the Cork Main Drainage Scheme in 1998 (Excavations 1998, No. 62, 96E0157).

There was a paucity of finds in this, the easternmost, section of the excavation compared to the medieval layers to the west, where the thick organic clay layer may indicate an area where waste material was dumped to the rear of houses on North Main Street. Such organic levels are common in medieval excavations in the city. At Christ Church/Holy Trinity the area behind the medieval houses appears to have been used primarily as a rubbish dump (Bradley 1985 et al., 29).

Further archaeological testing at this site has been recommended.

References
Bradley, J. et al. 1993 Urban Archaeological Survey, County Cork: Cork city. Unpublished, Office of Public Works.
Cleary, R., Hurley, M.F. and Shee Twohig, E. (eds) 1997 Skiddy’s Castle and Christ Church, Cork: excavations 1974–77 by D.C. Twohig. Cork.

AE House, Monahan Road, Cork