2010:416 - Church Lane, St Canice’s cathedral, Kilkenny, Kilkenny

Test-excavations were commissioned by the Diocese of Ossory and Cashel to accompany a planning application to Kilkenny Borough Council for the construction of a community resource centre at a 19th-century coach-house at Church Lane, Kilkenny. The development area was a 24m (east–west) x 22m walled plot, 20m from the east wall of St Canice’s Cathedral and bounded on the west by Church Lane and on the south by Common Hall Lane. Until the 1800s it formed the rear garden for the Vicars Choral on Vicar Street to the east. The carriage drive of the former Bishop’s Palace (now headquarters for the Heritage Council) adjoins the north side of the site and the east abuts the rear gardens of houses on Vicar Street.
A single test-trench was excavated manually within the footprint of the new building. The earliest archaeological features encountered were a post-hole and pit that truncated the subsoil at a depth of 1.5m from the surface. These were evidently part of a timber structure, possibly a building. No finds were directly associated with the features but they were sealed beneath a dumped deposit that contained a sherd of Kilkenny-type pottery, a ceramic that can be dated to between 1250–1350. This raises the possibility that the features relate to a structure that is of early Anglo-Norman date or perhaps predates the conquest. A monastic proto-town is thought to have been present on the high ground that overlooks the river Nore and surrounds the cathedral but to date no substantive evidence for its buildings (most of which would have been timber) has been documented. Covering the medieval dump deposit was a series of early modern levelling horizons that are presumably to be related to the garden of the Vicars Choral. Later 18th- and 19th-century deposits above this included a yard surface, dumps of rubble and introduced garden soils.
Absent from the excavation was any evidence for human burials, suggesting that the cemetery that was previously encountered in the adjoining Church Lane (Excavations 2005, No. 811, 04E1535) does not extend into the test-excavation area. This may be explained by the sharp slope in the ground that appears to have commenced close to the boundary wall with Church Lane (on the west), which would have acted as a natural edge for the graveyard. Instead, most of the archaeological levels would seem to be dumps of rubble and soil that represent various attempts between the 13th and 19th centuries to reduce the slope and allow for landscaping of the area. The resource centre was designed to allow for the preservation in situ of the archaeological layers and a monitoring condition placed on the development by the planning authority.