2007:28 - Donegall Arcade, Rosemary Street, Belfast, Antrim

Monitoring was undertaken within the proposed new development for Donegall Arcade shopping centre, Rosemary Street, Belfast. The earlier shopping centre was constructed in 1988 and as a result the site was subject to a considerable amount of modern disturbance from the foundations of this earlier build. In addition, the majority of the site had been subject to backfill, with construction debris from earlier demolition being used as a means of levelling the site. However, monitoring the construction works did identify some archaeological remains in situ, in the form of five red-brick walls.
A total of seventeen trenches were excavated. Some of the central trenches did produce evidence of earlier phases of construction, evident from the remains of fragments of red-brick walls. However, the full nature and extent of these features could not be fully ascertained due to the limited amount exposed and the lack of associated finds. Most of these red-brick walls emerged at 0.5m below the modern floor level of the arcade and survived to four courses high, in an English garden wall bond, orientated north to south. It appeared that the red-brick fragments located in the central three trenches of the site all follow the same north to south line across the site, possibly reflecting an earlier property division. Yet the sporadic nature of the excavation trenches does not permit a definite interpretation. According to the cartographic evidence, this area did not become substantially developed until the mid-1700s.