2016:713 - 14-16 Moore Street, North City, Dublin 1, Dublin

Monitoring took place of the Essential Works programme to temporarily stabilize Nos 14-17 Moore Lane, Dublin 1, a National Monument in state ownership, to prevent deterioration to the monument. This historic build comprises four mid 18th-century, brick terraced houses, which became a focal point during the 1916 Rising after they inadvertently became the final retreat and last headquarters of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic. All four buildings are in a very poor state of structural repair, their instability due partially to their antiquity, the inferiority of the build, the many later interventions but also to the fact that they were constructed within an earlier brickfield or clay quarry and therefore founded on gravels. The monument is undergoing conservation, restoration and adaptation for use as a commemorative centre and the temporary stabilizing works are intended to maintain the monument in advance of these works.
These works included underpinning in the cellars, the insertion of internal and external props, needle piles through the walls, the lifting of the floorboards, the repair and stabilization of existing unstable walls, the exposure and repair of the roofs.
A major part of the programme was sieving through the fill that had accumulated under the floorboards. This fill consisted of plaster fragments but with a huge collection of artefacts spanning the occupation of the house. These included papers, a spoon, match-boxes, lipsticks and sewing paraphernalia suggestive of a small-scale cottage industry. Other more high-quality artefacts included part of a cameo brooch, jewellery, a patriot pamphlet with pictures of Robert Emmet and Sir Edward Fitzgerald, and a stamp of (US) President Garfield (1884). Additional works involved monitoring the opening up of the roofs of the monument and inspection of the debris within the roof cavities. No artefacts were found in these locations.
The underpinning required the excavations of pits within the buildings and this confirmed the houses are cut into naturals clays. Propping to the rear of the properties also required pits but these were located in the rear yards and thus within the former infilled quarry.

Test-pit A
0 - 0.07m: Solid concrete
0.07 - 0.18m: Black humic organic matter with brick and fragments of wood and sherds of coarse earthenware.
0.18 - 0.4m: Mixed mortar layer with brick, small fragments of glass and pottery and loose slate. This is a demolition layer.

East section
0 - 0.08m: Concrete.
0.08 - 0.1m: Dark black silty clay with fragments of brick, mortar, glass and 19th-century pottery.
0.27 - 0.4m: Mixed fill with lenses of grey clays. This formed the bedding for a rough mortar floor extended over most of the trench apart from the south-west.

The deposits exposed in Trenches A and B can be related to the reclamation deposits that were used to infill the clay quarry that preceded the construction of the National Monument. These infill deposits represent domestic rubbish from the city which had degraded down into layers of organic clays, which extend, where not disturbed, to a depth of over 2m. These were located previously during archaeological investigations to the rear of the National Monument, specifically in the garden plots of Nos 15 and 16.
The works were carried out on behalf of Courtney Deery Heritage Consultancy.

28 Cabinteely Close, Cabinteely, D.18