2002:0524 - DUBLIN: Gascoigne Home site, Camden Row, Dublin

Testing was undertaken in March 2002 before development on a site formerly occupied by a Church of Ireland nursing home, the Gascoigne Home, at the south-east corner of the junction of Camden Row, Heytesbury Street, Long Lane and New Bride Street, Dublin 8. Testing in the yard immediately south of and behind this site was previously undertaken by Franc Myles in January 2001 (Excavations 2001, No. 367, 01E0018).

At the time of testing, the red-brick Gascoigne Home, founded in c. 1900, had been demolished. Although near St Kevin’s Church, the site and its vicinity appear to have remained undeveloped until the 1820s, when part of the southern side of Camden Row was built up and Heytesbury Street was broken through, linking the Grand Canal basin with Bride Street. Early maps of the area, including those by Charles Brooking (1728) and John Rocque (1756), depict a kink on Long Lane (Camden Row) near the site. The kink may correspond to the present kink at the south-west corner of the junction of Heytesbury Street and Long Lane. Rocque depicts gardens on the north side of the lane and an enclosed field on the testing site.

Two trenches were excavated mechanically across the site, parallel to Camden Row and just outside the footprint of the former nursing home (and its basement). Similar stratigraphy was revealed in the 22m-long, southern, Trench 1 and the 20m-long, northern, Trench 2: a deep layer of building debris (0–1.35m deep) overlying an interfacial clay deposit with 19th-/20th-century material (1.35–1.6m deep), in turn overlying a layer of cultivated soil with 18th-/19th-century material (1.6–1.85m deep). Sterile natural subsoil was encountered at an average depth of 1.85m. In places where the basement floor of the Gascoigne Home was still visible, it had been cut c. 0.15m into this natural subsoil.

The most noteworthy feature in Trench 1 was a large pit (4.1m by at least 1.8m) cut through the buried cultivated soil and the natural. Given its contents, it is likely that it was filled at the time of construction of the Gascoigne Home or perhaps shortly thereafter. The main noteworthy feature in Trench 2 was a pit (4.3m by at least 0.7m) of domestic rubbish/building debris cut into the natural subsoil, overlain by the aforementioned layer of cultivated soil and truncated by the Gascoigne Home foundations. The bulk of the datable material from the fill of this pit suggests a late 18th-/early 19th-century date. The feature may date to the early Victorian era, at which time terraced houses were being built in the vicinity of the site.

2 Killiney View, Albert Road Lower, Glenageary, Co. Dublin