2002:1328 - DUNDALK: St Malachy’s Church and Priory, Anne Street, Louth

Monitoring took place between 30 July and 22 August 2002 of subsurface works associated with renovations to St Malachy’s Church, Dominican priory and school, at the west end of Anne Street, Dundalk. The site lies immediately to the west of the area of the late medieval ‘Upper End’ suburb of the town. The origins of the Dominicans in Anne Street go back to 1777, when Lord James Hamilton, second earl of Clanbrassil, granted to Fr Dominic Thomas a long shed, formerly a linen factory, which he converted into a chapel. The building was outside one of the gates into the demesne, the boundary wall of which still survives at the rear of the properties on the north side of Anne Street. A new chapel was built in around 1830 on the site of the first chapel and is shown as ‘R.C. Chapel’ on the first edition of the OS 6-inch map, published in 1836. The present St Malachy’s Church was built in 1862–6 on a site immediately to the east of the original. The priory of 1867 occupies the site of the two earlier chapels.

The development consisted of the construction of a lift shaft and alterations and renovations to the existing sewers. Nothing of archaeological interest was noted in the excavations for the sewer pipes, which generally followed the lines of existing trenches.

The excavation for the foundations of the lift shaft was in a small open yard between the priory and the church and measured 2.9m east–west by 2.3m by 2m deep. Building rubble, consisting of stone, brick, mortar, ‘Welsh’ slate and soil, formed the bulk of the material excavated from below the concrete surface of the yard. Some earthenware and glass of 18th–19th-century date was recovered from the rubble. The rubble deposits overlay a short length of brick wall, aligned north–south, and an old ground surface situated toward the base of the excavation. The brick wall, 0.5m wide and 0.65m high, extended c. 0.6m into the area of the trench, where it had been truncated by the excavation for the foundations of the 1867 priory. The wall had been built in a cut through the old ground surface and continued below the base of the lift-shaft excavation. The brick wall pre-dates the building of the priory and may therefore be related to the chapel of 1830 or possibly to the first chapel in the converted ‘long shed’.

The old ground surface was at 1.7m below present ground level and survived only in the north-east corner of the excavation. Elsewhere it had been removed by the excavations for the priory foundations. It was a level compact surface of brown stony soil that contained occasional inclusions of charcoal and small burnt stones. The lift-shaft foundation trench was excavated to a depth of 0.3m into the brown stony soil, which continued below the trench base. No dating evidence was recovered from the brown stony soil, but it clearly represents the ground level at the time of the construction of the priory in the 1860s, as it is directly overlain by the rubble backfill against the priory foundations. Natural subsoil was not encountered in the excavation.

6 St Ultan’s, Laytown, Drogheda, Co. Louth