2006:310 - Eglinton Street, Cork, Cork

The development site, a large city-centre site in Cork, stands within the zone of potential for several 19th-century sites, including the terminus of the Cork, Bandon and South Coast Railway, a railway station at Victoria Road, a tram yard on Albert Road and an electricity generating station adjacent to the tram depot. Monitoring of the bulk removal of subsurface deposits to a depth of 5m below existing ground levels took place between May and October 2006.
The stratigraphy was fairly uniform over the total area of the site. Grey estuarine muds overlay the glacial gravels at the lowest levels of the site. The muds were interbedded and layered with gravels to within c. 2.7m of the existing ground levels on the site. These muds were sterile, except for occasional branches or trunks of trees washed downriver and embedded in the low-lying mud flats. A slight downslope of the muds and gravels to the south, west and north was noted. This may suggest that a high point in the original marsh which underlies Cork city centre was roughly in the centre of the development site. The upper levels of this natural material comprised a more peaty mud (c. 0.7m thick) with a high concentration of decaying reeds; these represent the reed marshes typical of the estuarine environment in the upper harbour. Narrow (0.2m thick) discrete layers of crushed sandstone, probably the tailings from local stone quarrying, were noted, particularly along the western perimeter of the site overlying the upper levels of the reed-rich estuarine muds. The upper 2m of the site comprised dumps of rubble and degraded building debris, including slate, brick, burnt soils and a dump of clay pipes. The centre of the site was largely disturbed in the upper levels, where the An Post sorting office had been constructed in 1980.