2007:959 - Black Freren House, Abbey Street, Kilkenny Town, Kilkenny

Excavations were conducted in November 2007 on a section of the medieval city walls within the garden of the Black Freren House, Abbey Street, Kilkenny. The excavation formed part of a programme of conservation measures for the city walls that are being guided and developed by the Kilkenny City Walls Steering Committee and funded by the Irish Walled Towns Network Fund and Kilkenny Borough Council.
The walls of Abbey Street form some of the most impressive survivals from Kilkenny’s town wall and the adjoining ‘Black Freren Gate’, which gave access into the Dominican precinct from the Hightown, is the last remaining gate in the circuit. A single cutting was excavated inside the wall, in the raised garden to the rear of the Georgian ‘Black Freren House’, a dwelling that was inserted into the garden of a ‘two-perch’ medieval burgage plot.
The excavations demonstrated that the builders of the city wall exploited the natural topography of the area by constructing the wall on an escarpment at the ‘lip’ of the south side of the former River Breagagh flood-plain. The exact date it was built is not recorded, though the archaeological evidence from this excavation, as well as the results of adjoining investigations for the Kilkenny main drainage scheme, suggest the wall was probably raised in the 1240s. Structural features included a slight internal base-batter, the truncated wall-walk level, a drainage hole and a putlog hole. Between c. 1250 and 1350 the interior ground level was raised by 1.98m, presumably to provide for dry, cultivable ground at the rear of a burgage plot, and further gardening levels were superimposed one on top of the other in the 18th–19th centuries, raising the internal ground level by a total of 3.8m. In the 17th–18th century the medieval parapet was lowered and almost completely replaced by the existing garden wall.