EMAP_Progress_Reports_2009_2.pdf - The Heritage Council

Waterford
Though the archaeological evidence is lacking, it has been suggested that the tenth-century
Dún may have contained a single main bisecting street from the river front to Cathedral
Square with the main west gateway on the crest of a roughly east-west ridge to the north of
the cathedral.
The settlement expanded to the west in the eleventh and twelfth centuries with the formal
layout of three east-west streets- High Street, Peter Street and Lady Lane- outside the
postulated original nucleus. The east-west crest of the ridge broadened out to the west and
contained the three streets with the break in slope occurring north of High Street and south
of Lady’s Lane.
A 16m length of the original mid/late-eleventh-century metalled surface of Peter Street was
excavated (Scully & McCutcheon 1997, 55). The road was laid directly on the old ground
surface and appears to have been contemporary with the earliest level (mid-eleventh
century) of houses. The street was considerably damaged by a modern service trench though
may have been approximately 3.6m wide originally. The excavated portion of the street was
subsequently covered by a build-up of organic material and was never substantially
resurfaced.
The three main east-west streets were crossed by three or four north south bisecting streets
and lanes which continued downslope to the banks of the River Suir where ships were
presumably docked. Type 4 sunken buildings were excavated adjacent to the modern northsouth
Olaf street and could tentatively indicate a laneway of late eleventh century date
(Hurley 1997b, 9-10).
There is a considerable corpus of excavated pathways associated with plot boundaries and
buildings. Over half of the Waterford Type 1 houses contained pathways, particularly outside
the back doors. These pathways to the rear of the buildings were best preserved and
consisted of a variety of material including gravel, wattle mats, limestone slabs and timber
(Scully 1997a, 37).
The paths at the front of the houses were not as long as those to the rear, owing to the
proximity of these houses to the streets (Scully 1997a, 37). Modern service trenches had
unfortunately truncated the front of most of the street-fronting Type 1 buildings though two
buildings at Peter Street revealed short paths connecting the houses to the streets.
PLOTS AND FENCES
There is a general dearth of boundary fences at Scandinavian Waterford in contrast to the
abundant evidence from Dublin (Scully & McCutcheon 1997, 106). The location and evolution
of plot boundaries at Waterford seems to have been more fluid than excavated examples in
Scandinavian Dublin which were rigidly adhered to throughout the centuries (Wallace 1992,
47). The plot boundaries at Waterford were divided by post-and-wattle fences.
Fourteen contiguous plot boundaries were excavated at Peter Street (E639, E527, E406 and
E434) along an area almost 90m long, each plot containing the superimposed strata of at
least twelve levels of houses dating from the mid-eleventh to early fourteenth century (Scully
& McCutcheon 1997, 53-137). The plots were not all occupied at any one time and the
property boundaries changed slightly through the centuries.
Where the plot boundaries were excavated, they were usually confined to the vicinity of the
backyard houses with rarely any evidence for boundary divisions between street-fronting
houses (Scully & McCutcheon 1997, 54 & 106). The Type 2 houses in the backyards of the
earlier levels at Peter Street were also found to often transgress the boundary of previous
plots indicating that plot boundaries locations were not always strictly adhered to. One rare
excavated plot fence at Peter Street was uncovered in Level 1 (mid-eleventh century) and
was associated with a log track-way of horizontally-laid oaks (Scully & McCutcheon 1997, 54).
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