2013:570 - Site of St Thomas’s Church, Cathal Brugha Street, Dublin 1, Dublin

Introduction

A single test trench 1.2m in width and 54m in length was excavated as part of the Luas Cross City Investigation and Treatment of Cellar Works, where the permanent diversion of an existing 110kV electricity cable was required, along Cathal Brugha Street. Due to the nature of the cable, discrete diversions at street junctions were not possible and the cable was to be lifted and diverted as a complete unit. The revised course of the cable was to run parallel to the northern footpath of Cathal Brugha Street, alongside the modern St Thomas’s church, at a maximum depth of 1.5m. This traversed the site of the 18th-century St Thomas’s Church, where the associated graveyard to the south is a Recorded Monument. In accordance with Railway Procurement Agency’s Luas Cross City Archaeological Strategy, all works are being carried out under licence. Testing of the proposed new cable alignment was therefore required in order to determine if sub-surface remains associated with the original church and graveyard survived, and if they were likely to be impacted upon by the proposed ducting.

Historical context

The present St Thomas’s church (Frederick Hicks 1931) replaced a much larger church built between 1758 and 1762 by John Smyth. There is some evidence for there being a graveyard on the site from c. 1700, however the last burials appear to have taken place in 1882. A burial ground is not depicted by Rocque (1756), where an area of open ground with perhaps a flooded clay pit beside Marlborough Street is shown at this location. The eastern end of Gregg Lane survives today as Findlater Place, perhaps a much older lane truncated and fossilised by Luke Gardiner’s development of Sackville Mall. Upper Gloucester Street was developed sometime later and Smyth’s façade closed an urban vista of half a mile from the east. The church was built after the parish of St Mary was divided due to an increasing protestant population in the inner city. It was supposedly modelled on Palladio’s Redentore in Venice with flanking screen walls stretching to 182 feet (55.5m) (Casey 2005, 125). Parliament granted £2000 towards its construction and later contributed another thousand pounds for completion. At the time it was considered to have the most beautiful facade of any church in the city (Cosgrave and Strangeways, 1908), where pre-demolition images still suggest something unfinished. The church was gutted by the fire which destroyed most of Upper Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street) in July 1922, when Republican forces were forced out of the area by government bombardment. Although the main structure survived, the opportunity was taken to extend Gloucester Street (now Sean MacDermott Street) west to O'Connell Street and the remains of the church were demolished. The new St Thomas's church was erected in Cathal Brugha Street in 1930 on the site of the demolished parish hall and opened the following year; it took the RIAI Gold Medal for Architecture, 1932-34.

The graveyard is depicted on the first edition 5 foot to 1 mile map (1847), which was surveyed in 1838, and is labelled as ‘disused’ on the 25 inch edition (1907). The graveyard was cleared out during the post-Civil War reconstruction works and the remains were re-interred in Mount Jerome cemetery (SMR Archive). The site of the graveyard is mostly occupied by the Dublin Institute of Technology College of Catering (Robinson and Keefe, 1938-9). The foundation stone of Smyth’s church is preserved today to the left of the entrance of Hicks’ freestanding gable-fronted, red brick exercise in Lombardic Romanesque.

EXCAVATION DESCRIPTION

Trenching

The test trench recovered the position of the masonry foundation of the central entrance and northern stairwell, along with the broken crown of the eastern crypt (the backfilling of which, according to an Irish Times report of 15 December 1925, was begun the previous day by the City Commissioners). The masonry comprised a rubble calp limestone core where its surviving upper surface was located c. 0.4m below the present street surface, extending to a depth of at least 1.7m. It was faced to the west where its upper courses were above the contemporary ground level and truncated to the east, where the line of its face survived in section. The binding agent was a white lime mortar, which in one area at the core had not yet set, maintaining a putty-like consistency. Just to the west, the red brick crown of the vault over the crypt had been truncated at c.1.7m below the present street surface and its base was not reached at a depth of 2.5m. At its point of truncation just at the springers, the vault measured c. 4m across, suggesting that four similar sized crypts were constructed under the church. In any event, no further evidence for the vaulting was recovered further west at a trench depth of 1.6-1.7m. The crowns lay under a timber floor suggested by an offset in the limestone walls.

The only artefacts recovered were late 19th-century floor tiles and animal bone recovered from the backfill material. A niche in the wall at the northern entrance to the nave is replicated on the ground plan on the 5 foot map. The remains of the foundations of the rear wall of the church were located at a depth of 1.5m. The foundations of the western precinct wall of the churchyard were also recovered and recorded slightly further west at a similar level.

With the exception of the masonry at the eastern end, the test trench was excavated to a depth of 1.5-1.7m, with demolition rubble in a loose soil matrix being removed. A small extension to the east did not recover any further evidence for the foundations of the church’s large vestibule, which lay under the pedestrian crossing and has probably been removed by modern services. Where most of the trench was reduced to a level which could accommodate the proposed ducting, the upper levels of the in situ masonry core in the eastern portion of the trench conflicted with the required level of 1.2m below the present surface.

References

Casey, C. 2005. Dublin, London.

Cosgrave and Strangeways, 1908. The dictionary of Dublin: being a comprehensive guide to the city and its neighbourhood, Dublin.

Archaeology and Built Heritage, 79 Queen Street, Smithfield, Dublin 7.