2018:052 - Buttevant, Cork

NMI Burial Excavation Records

County: Cork Site name: Buttevant

Sites and Monuments Record No.: CO017-053004- Licence number: E004896; C000825

Author: Eamonn Cotter

Site type: Religious house - Franciscan friars

Period/Dating:

ITM: E 554317m, N 609080m

Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.231565, -8.668756

Buttevant’s Franciscan friary is believed to have been built in or around 1250. The church survives but the cloister is now a modern graveyard. The church was built on ground sloping steeply towards the Awbeg River, and to compensate for the slope a two-storey crypt was built under the choir of the church.

Excavations around the four window embrasures in the east wall of the crypt were carried out in conjunction with a programme of conservation of the church by the Office of Public Works. Deposits removed from the embrasures were modern. Little survived of the original windows themselves: on the upper floor the south window has been completely rebuilt and nothing of the original survives, while in the north window the original 13th-century masonry has been partially blocked and a later medieval window inserted. In the embrasure of this window some original plaster survived, with evidence for applied paintwork. On the ground floor some of the 13th-century cut stone survives in both windows but the window heads have not.

Ballynanelagh, Rathcormac, Co. Cork