2013:526 - The Fisheries Yard, Leinster House, Kildare Place, Dublin 2, Dublin

Monitoring took place at Leinster House, at what was formerly known as the Fisheries yard, just inside the services gate off Kildare Street (and south of the National Museum of Ireland). The works involved the construction of a new service sub-station and security hut within the Fisheries Yard, at the rear of the National Museum. A total of four foundation trenches were excavated in an area measuring approximately 10m square with a service trench along the eastern side.

Leinster House is a protected structure (No. 4291), which was built in 1745, dominating this part of Dublin and spread out over a considerable area. The yard is positioned to the south-western side of the house, which originally formed part of Kildare Place, a Georgian terrace already in position in 1756, when it is depicted on John Rocque’s map of Dublin. These houses were orientated east-west and had gardens to the rear (east) bounded by open ground. The Kildare Place School (primary) occupied part of the site, founded by the Church of Ireland in 1811. This new type of school was multi-denominational, designed to educate children from different religious background in Ireland together, and it operated until 1969.

The four trenches measured 1.1m in width by between 1.3m and 1.4m in depth and revealed layers of rubble, mortar and brick. The typical sequence, from present ground level, was as follow:
0.00m – 0.3m: Concrete slab
0.3m – 0.8m: Black silty fill, containing 19th-century pottery and brick along with shell and cinders. This appeared to be a mixed dump of cultivated soil.
0.8m – 1.4m: Layer of mixed yellow clay and mortar, containing 18th-century brick fragments representing brick demolition rubble.
The archaeological investigation established that there is an 18th-century archaeological horizon at the site, in the form of layers of rubble, mortar and brick, suggesting it lies within the footprint of the 18th-century terrace. No structural remains in the form of walls, etc. were located within the trenches although they are likely to be in the general vicinity. These deposits represent the demolition material from the houses, which were partially demolished during the construction of the National Museum of Ireland in the 1880s: the rubble material was evidently used to infill the ground in preparation for the new construction. The banded nature of the deposits suggests that the infilling was carried out systematically, dumping from east to west. One of the layers suggested a brick-making works in the general vicinity in the form of a distinctive layer of brick dust, which is sometimes found in Dublin where the boulder clay was quarried and formed into bricks, to meet the demand for bricks in the 18th century. The remains of a solid brick floor were also found just 0.23m below the concrete slab level at the western end of the trench and this was traced for at least 8m north-south although it was truncated along the western side. This surface, which measured approximately 0.35m in depth, was made up of a compressed layer of loose, irregularly-placed dark orange brick, 18th century in date, mixed in with yellow brick, which is 19th century in date. It may suggest that this area formed part of an open yard in the 19th century as this type of floor was unlikely to be within a building.

28 Cabinteely Close, Dublin 18