EMAP_Progress_Reports_2009_2.pdf - The Heritage Council

Cork
Fig. 69: Hanover Street/South Main Street, Cork, Level 1 (after Cleary 2003, 33).
The remains of at least seven Type 1 houses and one definite Type 2 were identified. They
were typically rectangular with rounded corners in shape and contained central hearths and
internal divisions and doorways in the shorter end walls, with one exception. Finds associated
with the buildings included bone combs, carved and lathe turned wooden artefacts, stick pins,
a scale balance and pans, a barrel padlock and keys, crucible fragments, a net sinker, fishing
line weights, leather shoes, hone-stones and a late eleventh/twelfth century pottery
assemblage.
A series of east-west aligned Hiberno-Scandinavian type houses were excavated on reclaimed
ground on the east side (35-39) of South Main Street (Kelleher 2004). The buildings belonged
to Wallace’s Type 1 structures and contained post-and-wattle walls with rounded corners with
doorways all in the shorter side walls. Two Type 1 houses were also excavated towards the
medieval street front along the modern South Main Street. The buildings were associated
with pathways, track-ways and boundary fences.
Early- Mid Eleventh Century Stave-Built Buildings
The remains of two rectangular stave-built structures were uncovered towards the eastern
side (15) of South Main Street and represented either two successive houses or two phases
of a house built on the same plot (Hurley & Trehy 2003, 29-30). The latest house fronted
onto the medieval street and consisted of a north-south row of seven vertically set earth-fast
staves supported at the base by a row of stones. A vertically-set earth-fast post defined the
southern limit of the stave wall and was identified as a possible door jamb. The northern limit
of the wall was represented by a single vertical post and two east-west aligned staves which
formed part of the return wall of the building. The overall width of the structure was
estimated to be 6.32m which would place the structure in the larger range of excavated
twelfth-century buildings in Cork and Waterford. Dendrochronological dates from the timbers
of the building centred on A.D. 1131-32. The structure appears to have replaced an earlier
building of similar construction and of roughly the same size represented by six poorly
preserved staves and two rectangular posts. The two vertical posts were recorded at the
north and south ends of the stave-built wall and corresponded to the location of the door
jamb and north corner post of the Phase 2 house.
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