2017:011 - Pontoon Road, Castlebar, Mayo

Intermittent monitoring of groundworks was carried out between 15 August 2016 and 22 March 2017, at a development within the campus of the Sacred Heart Hospital on the Pontoon Road in Castlebar, County Mayo. The development consisted of the demolition of two wards and the construction of a two-storey extension and associated site works, services, car parking and landscaping. The monitoring was a condition of planning permission and was necessary as the hospital was built on the site of a workhouse, the cemetery of which was located immediately north-west of the site. There were no recorded monuments located within or in the immediate vicinity of the hospital campus.

The majority of the groundworks took place within the footprint of a portion of the recently demolished buildings. The development site also included a service area, a green area and areas of quarried stone/hardcore and tarmac adjacent to the existing hospital buildings. Most of the evidence revealed during the monitoring related to the recently demolished 20th-century hospital buildings, which were constructed above natural subsoils and bedrock. Also revealed was a portion of a building associated with the 19th-century Union Workhouse, which stood on the site prior to the development of the 20th-century hospital. The series of sub-surface walls were uncovered near the south-west corner of the development site. They belonged to a building shown on the 1919 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet, which was surveyed between 1893 and 1899, a short distance south-west of the main Workhouse building and marked 'Hospital (Infectious Diseases)'. Construction of the Workhouse began in 1840 and it opened in 1842. It was located on seven acres of land donated by Lord Lucan and cost £12,000 to build. The building had capacity for 600 people (www.nationalarchives.ie).

4 Lecka Grove, Castlebar Road, Ballinrobe, Co. Mayo