County: Dublin Site name: DUBLIN: 81 Amiens Street
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 02E1580
Author: Franc Myles, Margaret Gowen & Co. Ltd.
Site type: Building
Period/Dating: Post Medieval (AD 1600-AD 1750)
ITM: E 716726m, N 735234m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.354421, -6.246587
This assessment was undertaken at the rear of a 19th-century building on the corner of Amiens Street and Seville Place, outside the zone of archaeological potential of Dublin. The area was tested by mechanically excavating two trenches to c. 3m below present ground level. A third pit was excavated at the request of the developer to investigate the foundations of the adjacent funeral parlour. A similar stratigraphical sequence was recorded in all trenches, where cellars relating to the mews buildings on the site truncated a deposit of clean, introduced clay, which overlay river gravels and silts.
The line of Amiens Street follows the shoreline, delineating the high-water mark in the period before the reclamation of the area bounded by the North and East walls in the early 1700s. The early development of the area can be seen on a Corporation lease map of 1717, which depicts the new plots to be granted by the City Assembly on the reclaimed ground. The reclamation work was carried out by gradually filling the area with imported soils and domestic rubbish after it had been secured by the walls.
The pictorial border on Charles Brooking’s map of 1728 shows the area under reclamation, and the map itself indicates that the area is ‘walled in, but as yet overflow’d by ye tide’. The reclamation had not been completed by the time of the publication of the first edition of the OS in 1837, and sections of the polder were subject to serious flooding as late as the 1950s.
In 1800 what had been referred to as The Strand was renamed Amiens Street, after Viscount Amiens, who was created earl of Aldborough in 1777. He built Aldborough House in 1796 on the side of Amiens Street opposite to the site.
By the time of the publication of William Duncan’s 1821 map, there was a structure on-site at Amiens Street but possibly not that which stands today. The mews buildings to the rear were probably built as the site was redeveloped into the terrace of houses that survives today.
The 1847 edition of the OS depicts this terrace. Three buildings, two of which appeared to be still under construction, occupied the yard to the rear of No. 81. The laneway to the south-east of the site was not depicted until the 1876 edition, by which time the buildings had been completed.
The results of the testing suggest that the mews buildings, which occupied the site before their demolition, truncated any deposits sealing the layer of clay. This material does not display the stony characteristics of the boulder clay encountered to the west at Abbey Street, where the writer monitored the Luas construction works.
The deposit in Amiens Street is quite pure and was possibly introduced over the area as a reclamation measure in the 1720s.
2 Killiney View, Albert Road Lower, Glenageary, Co. Dublin
