What is recorded here

Excavation at St. Francis Street in County Limerick revealed a Franciscan friary buried beneath later buildings and road works. Florence Hurley dug twelve trenches in 1996 after earlier trial work exposed walls and human bone. The site had changed from medieval religious ground to courthouse land and finally to a relief-road construction area. What remains visible is a layer cake of loss, faith, authority and forgetting.

Excavations carried out at St. Francis Street by Florence Hurley in 1996 under licence No. 95E0218 were summarised as following; 'This site is one of a number that will be affected by the construction of the Northern Relief Road through this part of Englishtown. Trial-trenching in 1988 had indicated the presence of walls and human bone. The site has long been associated with the Franciscan friary [LI005-079----] founded in 1267. It lies just outside the eastern part of the town wall, and to the south lies Long Lane. The structures of the friary went gradually into ruin after its dissolution between 1540 and 1548. What remained was removed when the county courthouse was built on the site c. 1732. It was demolished in the middle of the last century. Twelve trenches were opened along the rake of the new road, and archaeological material was found in eight of these. This can be divided into five main phases. Pre-friary activity This consisted of a series of organic deposits, 1.5m deep. From these came a relatively large amount of animal bone and occasional sherds of local and imported medieval pottery. Near the base of these deposits was a cobbled surface' (www.excavations.ie). Compiled by: Caimin O'Brien Date of upload: 19 December 2019

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