Burial, Coldwinters, Co. Dublin

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Burial Sites

Burial, Coldwinters, Co. Dublin

Seven people were buried here, carefully laid out east to west with their heads pointing west, and then the site was forgotten so completely that it only came to light because a road was being built.

That is roughly the sum of what is certain about the burial ground at Coldwinters, a place whose name appears on no pilgrimage route and no heritage trail, and whose significance remains, in the technical sense, undated.

The site was uncovered in 2001 during excavations along the Airport to Balbriggan Northern Route, carried out under licence number 99E0548. What emerged was a large circular enclosure roughly fifty metres in diameter, defined by a ditch nearly two and a half metres wide and up to one and a half metres deep. Inside it, three smaller ditches had been cut, and within those lay six human burials. A seventh burial, set within a slab-lined grave, was found in a sub-rectangular ditch running off from the main enclosure's edge. All seven were extended inhumations, meaning the bodies were laid out flat rather than crouched, and none had grave goods buried with them. The enclosure also yielded animal bones, flint, and iron slag, suggesting the site had some broader functional life beyond burial. The east-west alignment of the graves, with heads to the west, is consistent with early Christian burial practice in Ireland, though the excavation report compiled by Opie in 2003 leaves the date uncertain. The absence of grave goods makes it difficult to pin down a period with any confidence.

The site lies in the Coldwinters townland area of north County Dublin, in landscape that has been substantially altered by road development. There is no public monument or marked access point, and what was uncovered in 2001 would by now be beneath or beside the road corridor. For anyone with an interest in the archaeology of the region, the excavation record rather than a site visit is the more productive starting point, held through the National Monuments Service. The real curiosity here is the quality of organisation visible even in the bare data, a large enclosure containing smaller ones, containing the dead, with one individual set slightly apart in a stone-lined grave, suggesting distinctions of some kind that can no longer be read.

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