County: Dublin Site name: Raheny South
Sites and Monuments Record No.: DU015-082 Licence number: 17E0384
Author: Gill McLoughlin, Courtney Deery Heritage Consultancy
Site type: Medieval and post-medieval deposits
Period/Dating: —
ITM: E 721331m, N 738039m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.378580, -6.176387
Monitoring was carried out on behalf of the board of management of Scoil Assaim in response to a condition of planning relating to a school extension development (Planning reference DCC 2676/16, condition no.4). The development area lies immediately south of, and partly within the zone of archaeological constraint for DU015-082 which comprises an ecclesiastical enclosure, church and graveyard at Raheny Village (DU015-082001, 002, 003). The site is located on the corner of Watermill Road and All Saint’s Road. Monitoring took place intermittently over 10 days from the 27 July to 12 September 2017.
Despite extensive modern disturbance to the site, within the foundation trenches along the northern side of the building, there were indications of archaeological activity in the form of metalled deposits and spreads of grey soil with inclusions of sea shell, animal bone and pottery. Two separate spreads and two areas of metalling were identified within the trenches and a small quantity of medieval and post-medieval pottery was recovered from these deposits. The presence of medieval and post-medieval pottery in the same contexts suggests that they were not intact archaeological deposits. The earlier material appears to have been disturbed and re-deposited along with the post-medieval material at a later date.
A more recent deposit on the site (over an old topsoil layer) contained frequent inclusions of modern glass throughout. The glass recovered from this layer comprised bottle fragments, lumps of cullet glass and waste fragments of glass. One fragment thought to be part of a glass furnace was also recovered indicating that the material had originated from a glass-working site. Based on the lack of any structural evidence for glass manufacture on the site and the lack of any recorded glass manufacturing sites in the area, it is thought most likely that this deposit was brought onto the site from elsewhere and could have been related to the building of the existing school on the site in the 1950s. The majority of the glass bottle fragments recovered from the site had IGB maker’s marks on the bases and date to the last decades of the 19th century or into the early decades of the 20th century.
Courtney Deery Heritage Consultancy, Lynwood House, Ballinteer Road, Dublin 16
