County: Meath Site name: TRIM: 18 Market Street and Emmet Street
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 02E1671
Author: Carmel Duffy
Site type: Excavation - miscellaneous
Period/Dating: Multi-period
ITM: E 680100m, N 756780m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.554826, -6.791115
Testing was carried out prior to development of the site. Six trenches were opened. The seventh, Trench 1, was to be located beneath the slab to the Market Street front of the site. Trenches 2-4 were immediately south of this. In these three trenches, immediately under the floor of the former building, was a dark-brown silty clay with occasional small stones, a 10% charcoal content, with slate, brick and oyster shells (F1). Two medieval potsherds were picked up on top of this, and also a modern potsherd and several fragments of bone. A 1m-wide sondage was excavated by hand in Trench 4 to try to establish the depth of the deposit. This revealed a rectilinear pit cut into the natural subsoil. The fill was dark-brown/black silty clay, which contained two sherds of medieval pottery and one bone fragment. It was excavated to a depth of 0.62m but was not bottomed.
To the east of the pit was an apparent metalled surface, which ran out of the north and south of the sondage. In the southern part of the sondage was an area of fire-reddened clay, which had a lens of ashy material around it. In the south section of the sondage, this clay had immediately beneath it three small black lenses and a lens of fire-reddened soil. In the south-east corner of the test section there was an area of very black silty clay, a possible pit, 0.4m in diameter, which contained no finds.
In Trench 5, there was a further deposit of F1 in the centre of the trench. This lay on top of a possible stone surface. In the F1 there were five glazed medieval potsherds, one sherd of Leinster cookware, bone fragments, brick fragments, one small slate, an iron nail and three white-glazed potsherds.
Trench 6 contained what appeared to be early modern building rubble and a modern sewer pipe and trap. There was a deposit of F1 in the southern end of the trench, and a similar deposit occurred in the northern end. It would appear that F1 formerly occurred throughout the trench, but was removed from the centre by building activity in the early modern period.
Trench 7 was even more disturbed, containing a lot of building rubble. However, in the northern end of the trench there was a further deposit of F1-type material.
Umberstown Great, Summerhill, Co. Meath
