In 1967, workers digging a trench just over half a metre deep disturbed human remains, and among them was a skull bearing the marks of trephination, a surgical procedure in which a hole is cut or drilled through the bone of the cranium, practised across many cultures and many centuries for reasons ranging from the release of pressure on the brain to ritual or spiritual purposes. It is one of the oldest known surgical interventions in human history, and evidence of it turns up in skeletal remains from prehistoric times right through to the early modern period. That a skull showing this procedure was found in Dublin is striking. That nobody now knows exactly where it was found makes it stranger still.

The discovery was recorded and the material catalogued through the National Museum of Ireland, and the find is referenced in the NMI's survey work by Cahill and Sikora, published in 2011. Beyond those bare coordinates, the record is thin. A trench, a depth, a year, a remarkable skull, and a location that has since become uncertain. Whether the remains were medieval, early modern, or earlier still is not noted in the available record. Dublin's south city has been continuously occupied, built over, and rebuilt for centuries, and archaeological finds turn up in utility trenches and construction sites with some regularity, not always under conditions that allow for careful documentation of precise coordinates.

Because the exact location is unknown, there is no site to visit in any conventional sense. The find is held within the NMI collections, and anyone with a serious research interest could consult the Cahill and Sikora catalogue for further detail. What this entry in the record really represents is a fragment of a life, someone who either survived a significant surgical intervention or did not, whose remains surfaced briefly during a routine dig in 1967 before being absorbed into an institutional archive. The south city pavement above wherever that trench was dug gives no indication of what was found below it.