County: Kildare Site name: Magee Barracks, Melitta Road, Kildare
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/a Licence number: 14E369
Author: Antoine Giacometti
Site type: No archaeological significance
Period/Dating: —
ITM: E 673460m, N 712638m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.159297, -6.901591
A programme of test-trenching took place within the grounds of the former Magee Barracks, to the east of Kildare town, and fronting onto the east-south-east to west-north-west line of Melitta Road. A new school is planned for the site.
The Kildare Barracks were constructed in 1900 on this site (and on the adjacent site of the former Lock Hospital, which it incorporated as an administrative building). The barracks, housing the Royal Field Artillery, was a sprawling campus, spreading out to either side of a central accessway. To the rear of this lay the paddocks and stables for the horses (now largely occupied by the proposed development site). The barracks is abandoned but reasonably well preserved.
Following Irish independence in 1922, the Barracks was used as a base for the newly formed Garda Síochána, who took it over from the British Artillery in April of that year (Leinster Leader, 25/08/1973). The Barracks was rebuilt in the 1930s for the Irish Artillery – the first to be built in the Free State, under the name Magee Barracks. It closed in 1998.
Five test-trenches were excavated across the moderate potential areas of the site. No archaeological material was identified, and all features were 18th- and 19th-century agricultural drains or early 20th-century material associated with the former Magee Barracks. A distinctive bend along Melitta Road visible from the first edition OS map onwards and on satellite photography was suggestive of a circular enclosure adjacent to the site, but the testing did not find any evidence for this.
Archaeology Plan, 32 Fitzwilliam Place Dublin 2
