2014:413 - Georges Street, Waterford, Waterford

Testing took place in advance of renovation/conservation works at a landmark pub in Waterford City, T and H Doolans. The buildings which comprise the present licensed premises are Nos 31, 32 and 33 Great Georges Street. T and H Doolans is a protected structure, # 142 in the Waterford City Protected Structures list and No. 33, which was added to the bar in recent years, is a protected structure no 138. The original wine and spirit store was No. 32, which is described in the National Architectural Inventory (ref. 22501100) which dates the premises from 1680 – 1720. The Anglo-Norman town wall is upstanding in the land to the south-west of the site under review. The projected line of the town wall crosses the street and underlies the western wall of T and H Doolans original western wall, which projects from the streetscape to face O'Connell St, at its junction with Gladstone Street.

The sum of all respected literature about the city wall indicates it crossed the street and continued under what is now the boundary between Nos 32 and 33. Historic references to the wall in this area include The Very Rev. Canon Power (1943), who noted that ‘Surprisingly, several erudite commentators say the line of the Anglo-Norman wall is undetected in this area’. In his article on the town wall of Waterford, he describes the wall as crossing Georges Street, and ‘appears again as a few yards of west wall basement in Doolan’s premises whence it is traceable by map only. It strikes north-east through the S.E. angle of the Bank of Ireland premises, through the back premises of Messrs, Chapman & Bell, till, at a point twenty feet through the house numbered 5, Barronstrand Street, for the N. W angle of Cathedral Place (formerly Chapel Lane, off Bailey’s Lane). Forty feet from this corner the wall, up to this running straight, turned north and at a few yards distance, ran into Turgesius’s Castle at the latter’s S.E. angle'.

The testing established a lack of archaeological deposits in the back yard of No. 30 Georges Street, which is and was a back yard area over the long history of occupation of the area. This is a feature of house plots from Viking Age onwards, where houses maintain the boundaries and spatial occupation through to modern times. The interior of No. 31 is proven to be a backfilled brick-built cellar. Finally, the testing confirms historical and cartographic sources indicating the line of the city wall. While the proposed renovation plans will not impact on the line of the city wall, nor cause any damage to any surviving deposits I would recommend that the line of the city wall be demarked within the premises, and an information panel provided to show its part in the fabric of the medieval city.

Power, Rev P. 1943, ‘The Town Wall of Waterford’ JRSAI LXXIII.

7, Bayview, Tramore, Co. Waterford