County: Antrim Site name: WEST STREET, CARRICKFERGUS
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: AE/08/219
Author: Ruairí Ó Baoill, Centre for Archaeological Fieldwork, School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen's University Belfast.
Site type: Urban, medieval town defensive ditch/late 16thcentury town defensive ditch
Period/Dating: —
ITM: E 741121m, N 887383m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 54.714705, -5.809715
An excavation was carried out at the site of the Methodist church, Albert Road/West Street, Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim, on behalf of the Northern Ireland Environment Agency: Built Heritage to assist in the mitigation of significant medieval and post-medieval archaeological remains that were uncovered in an earlier excavation that took place after the demolition of the church.
Two new trenches, 16m apart, were excavated from 5 to 23 January 2009. The Tudor defensive town ditch was uncovered in both trenches. In the northern trench (Trench 1) the cut for the Tudor ditch was a maximum of 4.1m wide and 1.1m deep. No evidence for an internal bank survived the later disturbance on site. A number of copper-alloy pins and needles along with leather off-cuts and three base copper late Elizabethan coins were also recovered from the basal fills of the ditch. Within the ditch base were also found the badly disturbed basal remains of a wooden structure, possibly a sluice gate. The structure took the form of two parallel lines of large stones, below which were the remains of a wooden framework structure. It seems to have been dismantled at a later stage and the ditch subsequently silted up. The ditch was later recut on the same alignment but slightly narrower.
16m south of Trench 1, in the southern trench (Trench 2), a 2.5m-long section of the Tudor town defensive ditch, was also excavated. This was recorded as having a maximum width of 4.2m and depth of 0.7m, but narrowed as it ran northwards beyond the limit of excavation before widening again before it was uncovered in Trench 1.
Excavations at nearby Essex Street, carried out by the writer in 1991 and 1992 (CF20 1991 and CF20 1992, see Excavations 1991, No. 5; Excavations 1992, No. 2), showed that, there, the Tudor ditch was recut on the lines of the earlier medieval ditch. Between Essex Street and the Methodist church site excavated in 2009, the lines of the two town ditches seem to have diverged. There were no medieval artefacts uncovered in the trenches excavated across the Tudor ditch during the 2009 excavation. Another linear feature was uncovered in the south-east of the Methodist church site and this may be the badly disturbed remains of the medieval town ditch.
