County: Galway Site name: Cloghatisky
Sites and Monuments Record No.: GA094-017 Licence number: 18E0599
Author: Anne Carey
Site type: Within Zone of Notification for mansion
Period/Dating: —
ITM: E 528315m, N 724779m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.268500, -9.074627
Trial trenching was carried out at St Anne’s/Lenaboy Castle, Taylors Hill, Galway, from 15–19 October, 2018. The testing programme was preceded by an extensive geophysical survey. The archaeological assessment was requested by Galway City Council prior to the transfer of the property, which was a former orphanage, from the Sisters of Mercy into their ownership. The geophysical and archaeological investigations sought to establish if any human burials relating to the use of the building and grounds as an orphanage from the early twentieth century to the 1970s were present on site. The investigations were also cognisant of the possibility of archaeological remains at the site relating to its designation as a Recorded Monument.
A total of twenty-eight trenches were excavated at the site. There were two features of probably nineteenth-century date discovered during the testing: a tunnel and a water storage chamber with an associated stone-lined drain, located just to the south of and associated with Lenaboy Castle. The existence of the tunnel was known since the discovery in recent years of an entrance to the south but the extent of the feature had not previously been explored.
No human bone was discovered in either of the features or in any of the trenches and there were no possible interment sites identified. Apart from sherds of post-medieval Blackware, finds consisted of crockery, clay pipe and glass of nineteenth- to twenty-first-century date.
80 Portacarron, Ballymoneen Road, Galway.
