2014:079 - CASHEL: Boherclough Street, Tipperary

An excavation was undertaken on a robbed-out section of the west line of Cashel town wall and external ditch in order to comply with planning conditions for an approved retail development. The development site is located within the back garden of Indaville House, an early 19th-century house in the south-west outskirts of the town. The south-west corner of the property is delimited by a standing section of the town wall and its projected line extends northwards for approx. 100m through the centre of the garden.

The sub-surface basal remains of the wall and an external ditch were identified beneath the garden surface during two phases of test trenching carried out within the site by Hurley (Excavations 2006, No. 1829, 06E0415) and Moraghan (13E125). Both phases of testing identified an area in the south end of the garden where the sub-surface remains of the wall had been robbed down to the level of the underlying natural subsoil. No archaeological features were recorded in the trenches excavated in the remainder of the garden during both phases of testing.

The development will include a 10m wide access road that will extend across the area where testing indicated that the sub-surface line of the town wall had been removed. The remainder of the levelled line of the town wall within the garden will be preserved in situ within a cordoned-off area and monitoring of ground works will be undertaken during the construction phase. This design methodology was formulated upon completion of the 2013 phase of test trenching in consultation with the National Monuments Service.

A 12m² trench centred on the robbed-out section of the town wall was excavated in 2014 to investigate the entire footprint of the access road. A metal detector survey (14R0110) was undertaken as part of this project and uncovered occasional modern inclusions. The garden soil within the trench measured 0.5m in maximum depth and was composed of a homogenous dark brown, silty clay with moderate inclusions of post-medieval and modern artefacts. The sub-surface remains of the wall were composed of a shallow line of unbonded angular stones within a loose matrix of lime mortar. This loose rubble ranged between 0.7m and 1.5m wide and appeared to form the basal remains of a rubble core within the now-absent wall facades. The slippage of the garden soil down between the stones had resulted in the presence of post-medieval pottery sherds at the base of this material. A loose spread of lime mortar extended for an average width of 1m to the east and west of the stones. This was differentiated from the rubble core by the absence of stone inclusions and may form the residue of the post-medieval quarrying of the bonded facades of the town wall. The rubble and mortar were found to overlie a thin lens of reddish-brown sandy clay soil that overlay the natural subsoil. This lens was not encountered outside the line of the wall and may form the remnant traces of a sealed sod layer.

The external ditch was exposed as a cut into the subsoil immediately to the west of the wall and it averaged 3.5m wide and 0.7m deep. The inner side of the ditch cut was concave and came to a slightly rounded base. There was no side slope at the west edge where the line of the cut survived as a barely perceptible scarp into the subsoil layer. The shallow depth and broad profile of this feature is similar to a number of other recorded sections of external ditches identified during archaeological investigations within the town. The centre of the silty clay ditch fill had been truncated by a parallel stone-filled drain that contained 18th/19th-century inclusions. While the ditch contained three sherds of medieval pottery it also contained later inclusions such as 18th/19th-century pottery and clay tobacco pipes. This mix of artefacts appears to be the result of disturbance created by later cultivation and drainage activity. The shallow depth and broad profile of the external ditch at this site is similar to a number of other recorded examples identified during investigations elsewhere within the town.