County: Sligo Site name: Connolly Park, Carrowntober, Tobercurry
Sites and Monuments Record No.: SL038-032---- Licence number: 22E0202
Author: Eoin Halpin
Site type: Urban brownfield - workhouse site
Period/Dating: Modern (AD 1750-AD 2000)
ITM: E 552314m, N 812229m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 54.057002, -8.728322
Sligo County Council are preparing to enter into a further construction contract for the development of housing at Connolly Park, Tobercurry. The area of development is in the vicinity of SL038-032---- and as such an archaeological assessment was prepared as part of the Part 8 application which consisted of monitored topsoil stripping. This took place on 26 April 2022.
The hard compacted linear band uncovered at the northern side of the site along with the cement-bonded walls are readily attributable to the remains of the workhouse development constructed on the site in the 1850s. Superimposing the outline of the workhouse as recorded on the Ordinance Survey map of 1910 onto the proposed development plan reveals that the features uncovered in the course of the monitoring precisely echo the features recorded on the OS map. The hard compacted linear feature is the remains of a trackway which originally skirted round the northern perimeter of the workhouse. The wall immediately to the south of the trackway is the northern boundary wall to the workhouse, while the right-angled return uncovered in the south-west corner is the east end of a range of buildings associated with the workhouse itself. Only the wall footings survive, there was no evidence of any associated floor deposits or other occupation deposits associated with any of the walls uncovered.
In addition, many of the red brick wall footings uncovered running across the site, some of which cut the lines of the wall associated with the workhouse, are the remains of the 1930's housing development, which were demolished in the 2010s.
While it is interesting that some elements of the workhouse survived the developments of the 1930s, the archaeological monitoring simply confirmed the accuracy of the 1910 OS map, suggesting that at least in certain areas across the general area, some elements of the 1850's workhouse buildings survived.
The location of these remains have been mapped and recorded, and nothing else of archaeological interest was uncovered across the area.
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