County: Derry Site name: James Street Great, Derry
Sites and Monuments Record No.: LDY014–031 Licence number: AE/08/156
Author: David McIlreavy, Centre for Archaeological Fieldwork, School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University, Belfast, BT7 1NN.
Site type: 19th-century industrial activity/possible late 17th-century ‘garden’ plots
Period/Dating: —
ITM: E 643182m, N 917077m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 54.999412, -7.325093
Monitoring was carried out during the redevelopment of a site at Great James Street, Londonderry. The site is located in the vicinity of a 13th-century Dominican priory, although the precise location of the priory remains unclear. To the north of the site a number of red-brick oven structures were uncovered immediately below present street level, abutted by a series of red-brick stacks with stone dividing ‘shelves’. The latter structures had been backfilled with coked coal, suggesting some form of small-scale industrial processing had been practised on the site, probably during the 19th century. These structures overlay the uppermost of three probable ‘garden’ terraces extending across the site, c. 10m in width, divided by a small ridge of packed clay, although the level of the dividing ridges had been truncated by later activity. The terraces directly overlay a riverine gravel ridge that had been deposited on natural subsoil.
Although no archaeological finds were recovered from the monitoring of the site, cartographic analysis suggests that the terraces may belong to ‘garden’ plots indicated by Phillips’ 1689 map of the city of Londonderry.
