2008:826 - Patrick Street/Bolton Street Junction, Drogheda, Louth

It is proposed to upgrade the road junction at Patrick Street–Bolton Street by removing a part of the existing earthen bank to improve the line of sight for traffic exiting the road junction and to construct a new footpath and pedestrian crossing.
Nine test-trenches were excavated within the location of the proposed development. Trenches 2–5 were excavated north–south across the bank from Patrick Street/Rope Walk, while Trenches 1 and 6–9 were excavated adjacent to the retaining wall on Patrick Street in order to determine if the town wall was present beneath or adjacent to the current line of the retaining wall. The testing revealed that the northern portion of the bank is constructed from a thick deposit of post-medieval rubble, possibly from the demolition of the cottages along Rope Walk to the south, and lay above a layer of post-medieval cobbles, which represented the original post-medieval road surface of Patrick Street.
No standing portion of the town wall was exposed in any of the test-trenches and no foundation cut or similar was exposed. However, it was determined from an examination of the archaeological, cartographic and photographic evidence that the medieval town wall would originally have been located c. 10–12m south of the existing modern retaining wall along Patrick Street at the base of a natural earthen bank, and though illustrated by Place in 1698 and by Taylor and Skinner in 1778, had been demolished and removed by 1830. Further fragments of the wall were removed by 1870–80 and only one major portion of the wall is visible in an aerial photograph of Drogheda taken in 1940 in the gable wall of a cottage on Bolton Street.