2020:200 - Commandant Hogan Square, Cashel, Tipperary

Subsequent to an archaeological and built heritage impact assessment from August 2017, a licence was granted to monitor upgrading the areas between the Cashel Town Walls and Cashel Courthouse and OPW Yard, in order to make it publicly accessible. This work entailed surface levels removal, service trench excavation for drainage and lighting, introduction of pedestrian footpath and topsoil for grass seeding and planting. The works also involved opening a 2m-wide section of a 19th-century wall to make the site publicly accessible from the adjacent public car park.
Monitoring commenced on 3 December 2019. It entailed mechanical excavation of ground works up to 0.9m in depth, but at 0.4m maximum for the most part. It was found that the western half of the site retained soils introduced during the 19th and 20th centuries and up to at least 1m in depth, while the eastern half of the site retained up to 0.3m of topsoil introduced during the 19th century, with an underlying yellow sticky clay as natural subsoil.

The work continued on 25 and 26 February 2020 and again on 13 and 14 October. The former entailed 33m of box trench excavation to retain ESB lighting ducts. This trench’s stratigraphy was 0.05-0.1m tarmac, over 0.15m concrete, over a mixture of loose limestone rubble, red brick, slate, mortar and grey sand - all modern materials. At intervals, the trench was truncated by existing services set in sand trench fill at a depth of up to 0.6m. The latter phase entailed monitoring of hand removal of a wall section between the rear of the Courthouse and Buckley’s Car Park for a Pedestrian Link on east side of the site. This breach was made to a width of 1.4m and was monitored for potential medieval architectural fragments.
The wall remains to be further opened to a 2m width, scheduled to occur in January 2021. No archaeology has been found to date.

Cashel, Co. Tipperary