County: Waterford Site name: DURAND
Sites and Monuments Record No.: SMR 9:5 Licence number: 04E0281
Author: Dave Pollock, Knockrower Road, Stradbally, Co. Waterford.
Site type: 19th-century tannery
Period/Dating: —
ITM: E 660815m, N 612237m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.258476, -7.109182
An impact assessment was made ahead of redevelopment at Durand's Yard, Parnell Street, Waterford. The site was a tan yard in the 19th century and a range of tannery buildings had survived around the west side. The yard had been built on low ground in the space between the medieval city wall and the precinct of St Catherine's Abbey.
Construction of the tannery vats had generally cut down to estuarine mud, but pockets of earlier garden soil over infill survived. There is no suggestion of late medieval artillery defences on site. The defences (protecting the abbey) on a late 16th-century drawing were probably earth-and-timber rather than stone, and might have been damaged by the removal of overlying garden soil. However, traces of timber revetment or wicker gabions would have survived in the tidal mud and none were found.
The demi-bastion and abbey precinct wall are likely to be off site, a few metres (the width of a lane) beyond the boundary wall at the south-east corner.
Development of a site potentially straddling the defences at 10 Waterside was monitored in 2000 (Excavations 2000, No. 1008, 00E0469), but the new foundations did not penetrate 18th/19th-century infill.
