2022:711 - Athlunkard Street/Sheep Street, Limerick, Limerick

Monitoring took place over a three-week period and involved the removal of overburden in preparation for installation of a Piling Rig, and the drilling of 71 piles to a depth of around 8m. The L-shaped plot had a narrow rectangular arm aligned north-west/south-east parallel with Sheep Street, and a broader rectangular portion aligned north-east/south-west parallel with Meatmarket Lane. A thick layer of topsoil mixed with modern demolition/construction debris overlay the whole site area and must have been imported sometime after the last archaeological investigations in 2015, as photographs show a deeper general ground level compared with the surrounding street level, and firm, stony ground.

Once the underlying firm ground level was reached, the site area was covered in a Geotextile membrane, and a 0.6m-deep layer of stone, to facilitate access for the Piling rig. A 60-tonne Continuous Flight Augur (CFA) piling rig on caterpillar tracks was employed to drill the piles to a depth of 8m to the level of the underlying bedrock, as determined by boreholes previously drilled to assess the ground stability.

This piling process is difficult to monitor because the underlying soils are slowly brought to the surface through the motion of the rotating screw of the augur, and it is not always possible to determine the levels at which various changes in soil structure occur. In addition, the action of the augur creates a pile of mixed soils roughly 1m high around the point of entry, which then becomes contaminated with wet concrete as the augur is extracted.

The stratigraphy observed in the portion of the site aligned with Meatmarket Lane was a thin band of organic-rich black gritty clay silt overlying a mid-reddish-brown sticky gritty clay silt containing occasional animal bone and small sub-angular stones. This latter material became paler towards around 3m depth, where it became a bright orange sticky clay.

In the Sheep Street portion of the site, the observed stratigraphy was a roughly 1m thick deposit of mixed dark brown/dark yellowish-brown clay silt containing occasional medium-large sub-angular stones, fragmentary animal bone, oyster shell and fragments of red brick, overlying pale reddish-brown wet silty clay and bright orange sticky clay. There was no evidence for the organic-rich layer in this location.

It was not possible to accurately record or measure depths or thicknesses of individual deposits, or to conclusively ascribe any recognisable cultural material (fragmentary animal bone and ceramic building materials) to any particular date range due to a lack of clearly diagnostic examples. Overall, much of the material noted was in every manner, the type that would be encountered in 19th/20th-century demolition debris, which given the city centre location and prior development history, is only to be expected. No diagnostic artefactual material of medieval or earlier date was noted during the monitoring.

Gurteen Cottage, Gurteen, Kilmichael, Macroom, Co. Cork