Burial ground, Burrow, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Burial Grounds
Somewhere beneath the rugby pitches of the Suttonians club at Burrow, on the northern tip of the Howth Peninsula in County Dublin, the dead are still lying exactly where they were placed, oriented carefully east to west, sealed inside long stone boxes.
The club's members train and play overhead, and there is nothing at ground level to suggest that anything unusual lies beneath the grass.
The cemetery came to light in 1937, when construction work on the grounds disturbed a number of stone-lined graves. These were cist burials, a form in which the body is enclosed within slabs of stone arranged to form a coffin-like chamber, each measuring roughly 1.8 metres in length. The east-west alignment of the skeletons is a detail that often points toward early Christian burial practice, since the tradition of laying the dead with their heads to the west, facing east, became widespread in Ireland following the arrival of Christianity. No grave goods were recovered alongside the remains, which is consistent with that same tradition; early Christian burial generally discouraged the placing of objects with the dead. The site was recorded by the archaeologist J. Raftery, whose notes were published in 1941. More recently, in 2004, monitoring carried out under licence during the installation of floodlighting at the club found no further remains, suggesting either that the earlier discoveries had been isolated, or simply that the new works did not reach the relevant ground.
The site is not accessible in any meaningful archaeological sense. There is nothing to see, no marker, no information board, and the ground shows no trace of what lies beneath it. The rugby club at Burrow occupies the site as a functioning sports ground, and visitors should not expect any kind of formal heritage presentation. What the record offers instead is a reminder of how frequently early burial grounds ended up beneath later development along the Dublin coastline, absorbed quietly into the ordinary fabric of contemporary life.