Quay, Wexford, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

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Quay, Wexford, Co. Wexford

Beneath the surface of Paul Quay in Wexford town, at a depth of just over a metre, lies the buried outline of what may once have been the medieval waterfront itself.

Archaeological testing carried out in 2003 on a plot fronting onto the quay and bordered by Oyster Lane uncovered several walls running northeast to southwest. One of them, a substantial 1.6 metres wide, is interpreted as a possible quay-wall, with evidence suggesting a lagoon once lay to its northwest and infill material to the southeast.

The detail that makes this find particularly telling is what turned up in the organic layers beside that wall: Leinster ware, a type of medieval pottery produced in the Leinster region of Ireland and commonly found on urban sites dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Its presence here, pressed into waterlogged ground alongside a buried wall of considerable width, points to a working waterfront that has long since been built over and forgotten. The broader picture this suggests is one of gradual land reclamation, a process common to many Irish coastal towns where the medieval shoreline was progressively pushed outward by successive generations of infill, so that what was once open water is now solid ground. The site lies roughly fifty metres south of the Crescent, placing it well within Wexford's historic core. The excavations were reported by McLoughlin in 2004 and 2006.

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