2002:1031 - KILKENNY: Bishop’s Palace, Troy’s Gate/Vicar Street, Kilkenny

Additional testing was undertaken in the grounds of the Bishop’s Palace, Kilkenny city, to assess the impact of a proposed pavilion extension to the north-east of the existing Bishop’s Palace.

The Bishop’s Palace is a multi-period domestic structure that presents, at front elevation, as a five-bay, three-storey, early 18th-century house with its entrance doorway placed off-centre. Its present appearance from the front belies its complexity and a history of building and alteration extending back to the 14th century. The Palace building sits in a large garden.

Testing was carried out by Teresa Bolger in May 2002 (see No. 1030, Excavations 2002) in the area of the garden where it is proposed to erect a new See House. However, because of the occupation of the site and the complication of services, during that phase of assessment it was not possible to excavate a trench on the site of the proposed pavilion. Jean Rocque’s map of 1758 shows a complex of buildings in that location. These buildings were also depicted on the 19th- and early 20th-century OS maps but were demolished during the 1960s. The buildings, which appear to have been of two-storey elevation, may well have been of an ancillary nature.
The assessment was carried out on 18 and 19 December 2002. Two trenches (A and B) were opened on the line of the northern and southern walls of the pavilion structure. The presence of a complex of modern foul-water drains throughout the pavilion footprint prevented more extensive testing. A mini-digger was initially used to break the tarmacadam surface and to remove overburden. Excavation by hand followed.

Trench A, on the line of the southern wall of the pavilion, measured c. 14m east–west by 1.5m. This trench exposed a series of limestone-paved floor surfaces surrounding a north-west/south-east-aligned rubble masonry wall. Two flights of steps were also exposed. Trench B was to the north of Trench A, on the line of the northern perimeter of the proposed pavilion building. Owing to the presence of services, the size of this trench was restricted, but it measured 8m east–west by 1.5m. A north-west/south-east-aligned rubble masonry wall was exposed, and a surface of red bricks was found adjacent to this wall. A potential kiln was uncovered in this red-brick surface.

That the assessment should have detected the buried remains of such structures is not unexpected. Jean Rocque’s map of 1758 shows an oddly shaped complex of buildings in the location of the pavilion. Of interest is that the main structural alignment of the building illustrated by Rocque corresponds with that of the walls uncovered in Trenches A and B. By the time of the initial OS mapping of Kilkenny in c. 1840, this building alignment was still in existence. A far greater level of detail was shown by the cartographers of the OS second edition of c. 1870. Two flights of steps were shown on this map, the northern one of which can be equated with a flight of steps revealed in Trench A.

On the basis of the cartographic evidence, we can assume that the building alignment exposed dates to at least the 18th century. The functions of the buildings remain uncertain. It is possible that they functioned in an ancillary capacity as food-storage or -preparation areas or as craft/light-industrial/storage space. The red-brick kiln-type feature revealed in Trench B may be evidence of craft/light-industrial activity. Nevertheless, it is likely that the building complex operated as an integral part of the Bishop’s Palace until demolition in the 1960s.