Archaeologists Explore Street in “Old Derry”

DERRY, NORTHERN IRELAND—According to a report in The Belfast Telegraph, an excavation conducted in what is now the center of Derry uncovered city walls constructed between 1613 and 1619. Archaeologist Ruairi Ó’Baoill of Queen’s University Belfast said that the work, which was open to the local community, focused on Nailors Row, a street that featured terraced housing adjacent to the city walls in the late eighteenth century. The last of these houses were demolished in the 1970s. “We know that people have been living in Derry for thousands of years and this area close to the double bastion is close to an area that’s shown on a map of the 1620s that shows a ditch that ran around the walled town,” Ó’Baoill explained. “Most of the archaeology we encountered has been to do with the people who lived in the city from the end of the eighteenth century up to modern times,” he added. The artifacts include pottery, glass, slate, clay pipes, Christian medals, and marbles. Traces of the walls, drains, and cobbled surfaces from the house structures also remain, he said. To read about excavations at the site of Ireland's most notorious prison, go to "Letter from Ireland: The Sorrows of Spike Island."