2005:022 - BELFAST: Waring Street, Antrim

In February 2005 as part of the Streetscape Project to regenerate the Waring Street area of Cathedral Quarter, Belfast, five pits for the planting of trees were excavated east of the junction at Waring Street/Donegall Street. The site lies within the historic nucleus of the 17th-century plantation town and the street is depicted on Philips’ 1685 map of Belfast as being well established with two-storey buildings erected in terraces with long gardens to the rear on both sides.

Archaeology was noted in only one of the tree pits, Pit 1, which was situated closest to the junction of Waring Street/Donegal Street. The remains of a wall foundation were recorded in the north-east-facing section of the pit. It survived to a height of 0.4m and consisted of at least three incomplete courses of red bricks laid on the face. Surrounding this was a dark-grey/black clayey sand, presumably utilised as a packing layer to secure the foundation. Both the wall remains and packing layer lay on a natural subsoil of greyish-yellow sand and were truncated by later cuttings for services pipes situated at either end of the section. It was fortuitous that the cutting of the pit merely clipped the foundation, as only a very small portion of the foundation was present in both the south-east- and north-west-facing sections. Above the foundation were two layers of overburden containing modern occupation debris. The date of the wall foundation recorded in Tree Pit 1 is as yet unknown but appears to precede the extant late 19th-/early 20th-century buildings at the corner of Waring Street and Donegall Street. As the cutting of the tree pit had little impact on the foundation, no further archaeological intervention was deemed necessary.

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