2010:266 - Belvedere College, Great Denmark Street, Dublin, Dublin

Archaeological works were undertaken in the central courtyard of Belvedere College on foot of a planning condition imposed by Dublin City Council. The development comprised the landscaping of the courtyard of the college, including the construction of a new podium in front of the O’Reilly Theatre entrance on the eastern side of the courtyard and the resurfacing of the area with hard and soft landscaping with all associated drainage works. The works have resulted in an overall slight increase of levels across the courtyard; however, the surface level was impacted upon by the insertion of a foundation for a flight of steps accessing the new podium and the excavation of a number of trenches to accommodate new drainage and planters.
Belvedere House was constructed for George Augustus Rochfort, second Earl of Belvedere, in the late 1760s by the stuccodore and contractor Robert West, with the fine plasterwork completed by Michael Stapleton by 1786. The façade closes off the northern vista of North Great George’s Street and, despite tinkering with the upper brickwork in the 1950s, it remains an impressive structure with some of the best neo-classical interiors in the city. Additions to the house have all been associated with the occupation of the site by the Jesuits, who constructed a school to the rear in the 1880s and neo-Georgian wings to the façade in 1952 and c. 1975. To this assemblage can be added the O’Reilly Theatre (Murray Ó Laoire Associates, 2000) and a new science block constructed in 2004. The yard which is the subject of this development proposal is thus completely enclosed by these structures, although the primary carriage access from Denmark Street remains.
The site lies just beyond the boundary of the area surveyed by John Rocque and does not appear on either of his maps of 1756 and 1760. The maps, however, indicate that the area was enclosed farmland at this period, just on the boundary of the fast-expanding city. The site’s physical location on the crest of the ridge overlooking the Liffey is significant as being on the boundary of the city’s liberties throughout the medieval period, with a recorded monument (DU018–024, a stone-lined well close to the junction of North Frederick Street and Dorset Street Upper) being mentioned in several accounts of the Riding of the Franchises, a feature which also appears on the Down Survey map.
Nothing of archaeological significance was recovered in the areas monitored apart from construction levels relating to the surrounding 19th-century school buildings and a stone-lined drain. This is possibly associated with a well a few metres to the north, depicted on the first edition of the OS in a yard off Graham’s Court, an area which has now been subsumed by the college.