Burial ground, Astagob, Co. Dublin

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Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Astagob, Co. Dublin

Somewhere beneath a set of playing pitches in Astagob, County Dublin, lie the remains of between seven and eight people whose identities are entirely unknown.

The ground above them has been lowered and levelled for sport, so the dead now rest at a different elevation to the land around them, quietly displaced by the ordinary business of the twentieth century.

The cemetery came to light in 1959, when excavation revealed a flat burial ground, the type with no mound or visible surface monument to signal its presence. The skeletons were oriented both east to west and north to south, a mixture of alignments that makes dating and interpretation difficult; east-west orientation is commonly associated with Christian burial practice, while other orientations may suggest earlier or more varied traditions. One burial appeared to have been slab-lined, a simple grave construction using flat stones placed along the sides of the pit, and another individual had been interred in a crouched position, a posture more frequently associated with prehistoric burial. Among the remains was what may have been an infant. None of the burials contained any accompanying objects, which means there are no grave goods to help establish a date or cultural context. The record is held in the National Museum of Ireland's Topographical Files, and is cited in Cahill and Sikora's 2011 survey.

Because the site now lies within active playing pitches, there is nothing for a visitor to see at ground level. The levelling of the terrain has erased whatever slight surface traces may once have indicated the cemetery's presence. The interest here is largely in the absence, in the fact that an undated and unidentified group of people, including at least one possible child, lies somewhere underfoot in a place now given over to entirely different purposes. For anyone tracing early burial landscapes in the Dublin region, the Astagob site represents the kind of accidental discovery that occasionally surfaces during groundwork, then slips back beneath the surface of everyday life.

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