2010:272 - 63 Merrion Square, Dublin, Dublin

No. 63 Merrion Square is a late Georgian townhouse (1793) and protected structure that has been headquarters to the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland since 1917. A new garden, based on that depicted on the large scale 1838 OS map, was proposed for the rear of the house as part of a programme to refurbish and conserve the building, the existing garden having fallen into some disorder. The garden occupies a stone-walled plot 8.8m in width and 43m in length, to the rear of which is a well-preserved mews house that is currently managed by the Landmark Trust. Following the production of a garden history report and a (largely unsuccessful) geophysical survey, a limited excavation took place over three days in May 2010. Direct historical evidence for the layout of the late-18th-century garden was confined to the 1838 map but this represented the garden c. 45 years after it was first laid out and it was not clear how it related to the original garden. It was therefore in order to carry out an archaeological investigation, both to address this question and also to chart its later development. A single 3m-wide cutting was placed roughly in the centre of the garden, from wall to wall. It was decided to open a single wide trench rather than a series of smaller cuttings in order to maximise the opportunity to recover garden features in plan, something that is difficult to achieve by using smaller ‘keyhole’ cuttings.
The earliest layer encountered was a sterile sticky buried sod horizon at a depth of 0.8m from the surface, that may be related to the marshy agricultural fields depicted on the 1760 Rocque map, and that occupied the area prior to the development of Merrion Square. No finds were recovered from the layer. The first stage in the creation of the garden for No. 63 was the dumping over the sticky sod of a 0.45m-deep formation layer of redeposited clay. The clay was probably derived from the excavations for the house’s basement level and whilst it was made up primarily of redeposited clay substratum it also contained red brick and rubble, including two iron nails, presumably derived from the construction activities in the early 1790s. This formed a level surface on which a garden could be constructed and no doubt covered much of the unsightly building detritus that was left behind once construction had been finished. Creamwares, black-glazed red earthenwares and unglazed red earthenwares accord well with a date for the deposit in the last decade of the 18th century to the first decade of the 19th. The next stage involved the construction of a path around the perimeter of the garden. It was placed directly over the redeposited clay and was a 0.7–0.8m wide x 30mm thick deposit of hard, compacted gravel and clay. A sherd of North Devon sgraffito ware was embedded in the path and, though predominantly of mid-17th to mid-18th-century date, these wares were produced in Devon until near the close of the century. Although only its eastern and western extent was investigated, the path is likely to have curved around to meet the door to the coach-house yard in the south and it may have broadened out to join the stone paving in front of the main dwelling in the north. This effectively formed an elliptical-shaped central bed, c. 21m long x 4.6m wide, very close to what is shown on the 1838 OS map. Once the formation level and the paths were in place, topsoil was introduced and spread out to form the single large central bed and perimeter beds which were circumvented by the path. The deposit in the central bed was a 0.12m-thick mid-brown silty clay on which a lawn would have been laid. It contained fragments of red brick, coal, window-glass, bottle glass and four iron nails and iron slag. Ceramics from the deposit were stoneware, black-glazed red earthenwares, glazed red earthenwares, unglazed red earthenware, decorated glazed red earthenwares, porcelain, creamware, transfer ware, pearlware, blue and white ware, ironstone and terracotta. Many of the terracotta and earthenware sherds derived from flowerpots. Bedding features in the form of ten parallel ‘stripes’ of dark soil crossed the centre of the bed. What exactly their function was is unclear but it is unlikely, given their close spacing, that they held plants and they should perhaps be more appropriately viewed as evidence for soil preparation. The construction of the eastern garden wall completed the garden (the western wall having been already in place before No. 63 was built). Later alterations to the original garden layout were quite minimal and took the form of the renewing of the paths, the importation of a new layer of garden soil and new planting.
The excavation at 63 Merrion Square has demonstrated that the basic plan of the late Georgian garden was accurately depicted on the 1838 OS map. It was a simple and formal layout comprising a central elliptical lawn which was circumvented by a gravel path bounded by perimeter planting beds at the base of high stone walls. We know nothing about the type of planting that would have taken place in the garden. The form of garden at 63 Merrion Square evolved to suit perfectly the confined, narrow plots to the rear of the terrace.
Opportunities to investigate sites such as 63 Merrion Square are extremely valuable, and this project, though small in extent, has made an important contribution to the study of the townhouse gardens of Georgian Dublin. The renewed garden at 63 Merrion Square, which was completed in early 2011, uses the historical precedent that emerged from the archaeological and historical studies.