County: Tyrone Site name: Castle Curlews
Sites and Monuments Record No.: TYR033–009 Licence number: AE/07/195
Author: Cormac McSparron, Centre for Archaeological Fieldwork, School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University, Belfast.
Site type: 17th-century house
Period/Dating: —
ITM: E 631904m, N 875796m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 54.629377, -7.505894
A small excavation was carried out at Castle Curlews, Co. Tyrone, a house built between 1611 and 1619 by Sir John Davies, Attorney General of Ireland. A trench measuring 2m by 1.5m was excavated in the interior of the building to attempt to find any surviving stonework of a mostly collapsed fireplace jamb to allow its reconstruction. Solid stonework of this jamb was uncovered 1.4m beneath the modern ground surface. Strata encountered during the excavation were all 19th- and 20th-century collapse layers, with collapse of stonework evidently having continued until recently. No occupation levels or the original floor of the house were uncovered during the excavation. The excavation had to be halted because the primary objective of informing the reconstruction had been achieved and further excavation would have been impossible without significantly extending the trench because of the depth of the strata.
