County: Waterford Site name: Franciscan Friary (French church), Waterford
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: E4443; C541
Author: Órla Scully
Site type: Urban post-medieval
Period/Dating: —
ITM: E 660987m, N 612461m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.260470, -7.106623
A proposal to create a new access route from Baileys New Street into the nave of the Franciscan religious house on Greyfriars would necessitate the lowering of ground level at the rear of No. 10 Baileys New Street. The garden is inside the Lady Chapel of the church, with the rear wall of the street-fronting house on the line of the original chapel wall. The test pit showed that the garden was filled with demolition debris, including a layer of roof slates.
Test pit A was excavated in the back garden of 10 Baileys New Street, in the area where it is anticipated that a stairway be introduced to bring the public from the laneway between the houses on Baileys New Street to the church which fronts onto Greyfriars Street.
The uppermost 0.3m was dark brown ‘garden’ soil which was introduced into the area. A shallow pit was noted at a depth of 0.2m in the north-east corner of the test trench. It contained some butchered animal bone and modern ware (cream with a blue stripe), a brass handle from a W.C. chain and a sherd of earthenware. These attested to a rubbish pit contemporary with the use of the house at No. 10.
A layer of rubble with high mortar content underlay the garden soil. The layer also contained broken red brick and broken blue slate in a matrix of dry mortar-rich silt.
Beneath this was a concentrated deposit of roof slate, mostly blue, with some purple. This was removed to expose a further rubble layer with some stone, more roof slate and occasional brick fragments, including a piece of yellow brick. There were seven sherds of ceramic pantile, 17th-century, but also some coal, a fish bone, nail, some glass and a fragment of sewer pipe. The deposit was removed to a depth of 3.38m O.D.
The level of the floor in the nave of the adjacent church is 3.07m O.D.
Two other test pits were excavated in the grounds of the church, to allow for installation of power points prior to the railings being removed. These showed the area had been raised at the time of the erection of the railings, with only re-deposited garden soil to level the area. This concurs with photographic evidence of the area from 1959, showing the area level with the street, which has now been re-established.
7, Bayview, Tramore, Co. Waterford.
