2024:344 - Courtlands East (Fardystown-Mayglass), Wexford

The client undertook the replacement of a municipal raw water mains supply project through the townlands of Courtlands West, Middletown, Churchlands, Glebe, Courtlands East and Haggardtown, County Wexford. These works were preceded by an archaeology and built heritage screening report in February 2024 (Ryan Hanley, 2024). This assessed a total scheme length of 3464m, of which 277m was identified as requiring archaeological monitoring. This section traversed the Zone of Notification for a cluster of archaeological monuments.

The trench was mechanically excavated with an overall length of 875m and width of 0.55-0.95m and depth of 0.95-1.45m.

The works involved mechanical excavation of a box trench to accommodate new water mains throughout its entire length. The trench was typically 0.3m in width and 1.2m in depth. A c. 35-50m length of trench was excavated each day, duct set in its base, backfilled and the road surface made good with tarmac finish.

All of the excavation was carried out along the route of a secondary national road with variations in proximity to the margins. The uppermost horizons were thus always composed of road surface (tarmacadam) with an underlying hardcore base or substrate. In some places, the current road surface had been re-laid over an existing surface which resulted in a variable thickness of between 0.1-0.4m of combined tarmacadam surface and hardcore (804) substrate. At no point of the excavation was there any evidence for buried topsoil or traces of topsoil.

No archaeology was encountered.