History Of Temple Bar - The Chameleon Restaurant

bordered by Temple Lane on the west and Upper Fownes Street on the east. Excavations here did locate part of the precinct wall and internal building (5-6 Cecilia Street) as well as part of the cemetery further south (see Archaeology 3-4 Crow Street). The cemetery was located on the site where the earlier Viking burials were located suggestive on a continuity of usage. The friary was dissolved in the sixteenth century and the buildings were converted into large mansions, one of which was known as the ‘Crow’s nest’, after William Crow.

The mill-race of St. Mary’s del Dam
The western half of Temple Bar was probably quite wet and subject to flooding in the winter. As a result the land there was probably only occupied sporadically. However, archaeological excavations at Meeting House square did locate the remains of a timber mill with tail race, dated to the thirteenth century. This mill probably belonged to the church of St. Mary Del Dam at Cork Hill, which had several mills close to Dublin castle.

Land reclamation in c. 1600
By the early seventeenth century the mural fortifications of the city were seriously impeding a general expansion and this was particularly true at the western end of Temple Bar, around the confluence of the Poddle. One of the major problems in Dublin was the fact that the port was silting up making it harder to land cargo at the quays. This problem is first identified in the documentary sources in the fourteenth century when cargo had to be partially landed at Dalkey (10 miles south of Dublin) and transported over land. This appears to have effected the Wood Quay, the main quay at Dublin very badly and moves were being made to build a new Custom House in the Parliament Street area. The Poddle confluence, however, had to be reclaimed first. The corporation did this by granted out the mud-flats to prominent individuals who gave an undertaking to reclaim the land. Two such men were Jacob Newman and Richard Proudfoot, the former receiving Isolde’s tower and the land to the east in 1603, while Proudfoot received land on the west side of Isolde’s tower.