2007:486 - DUBLIN: 10–11 Leinster Street South, Dublin

A licence was taken out to excavate two test-trenches and to monitor ground-reduction works over this site on foot of a planning condition. Leinster Street, as a continuation of Nassau Street, is quite possibly medieval in origin; its notional continuation on Rocque (1756), St Patrick’s Lane (now Lincoln Place), hints at an earlier origin again. The development site would appear to have been a greenfield shortly before Rocque’s survey, with Leinster Lane (one of the numerous ‘Stable Lanes’ depicted by Rocque) evidently forming a mews lane to the properties on the eastern side of Kildare Street.

The area was developed by the earl of Kildare from the 1750s onwards, with Leinster House forming the central focus of the development. This phase of development is captured by Rocque, where the properties are depicted as simple dwelling houses without returns, with long gardens extending back to a pair of mews stables on Leinster Lane.

Of particular interest on Rocque’s depiction is the land directly to the north, annotated as College Park and effectively forming the south-eastern corner of the Trinity College precinct. In plan form, it resembles a four-sided earthen bastion, with a small watercourse flanking its northern and extending along half of its eastern boundary. This is probably a remnant of the fortifications that were thrown up around the city in the 1640s, where the college accommodated an artillery park for some of the period.

The 1847 edition of the OS map depicts the properties as they were c. 1838. An external stair leads up from the rear basement yard of No. 10 to a formal garden, with a large demi-octagonal return built along the plot wall with No. 9. An external stair appears to access the upper floor of the mews structure along the plot boundary to No. 11. There is slightly more development evident to the rear of No. 11, where a more functional rear yard with ancillary structures is depicted.

In any case, it was found that the foundations of a 1970s office block had truncated the subsoil and anything that may have survived above it, including the foundations of the Georgian structures.