County: Meath Site name: DUNBOYNE
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 01E0887
Author: Finola O’Carroll, Cultural Resource Development Services Ltd.
Site type: No archaeology found
Period/Dating: N/A
ITM: E 701309m, N 742098m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.419268, -6.475886
Monitoring of the construction phase of a development at Main Street, Dunboyne, Co. Meath, was undertaken. Monitoring of topsoil-stripping and of the excavation of foundation trenches was a condition of planning.
The site was within the medieval town of Dunboyne (SMR 50:21). It fronted onto Main Street, and the rear of the site was bounded by a high wall separating it from the park and the river. A building known locally as the Tin House had stood on the site and been demolished, but this had been built within the previous 50 years.
Monitoring of the groundworks associated with the development took place over three days. The topsoil was stripped from the site using a 2m-wide ditching bucket attached to a mechanical tracked digger. It was very disturbed, with modern glass, plastic and crockery mixed throughout. The foundation trenches were monitored, but nothing of archaeological interest was revealed. The underlying subsoil was a mixture of clays with lenses of sands and gravels. Finds from the site principally consisted of ceramics and glass. The earliest of these were pearlware, produced between the late 1700s and the early 1800s, and clay-pipe fragments from the 1700s to the 1900s. A pearlware fragment was recovered from the base of a drain in Trench 4, suggesting that it pre-dated the 20th-century building that was cleared from the site in 2001. However, the remainder of the assemblage was entirely modern, dating from the late 1800s to the present.
Unit 4, Dundrum Business Park, Dundrum, Dublin 14
