Burial ground, Dalkey Island, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Burial Grounds
On a small island just off the south Dublin coast, eleven people were buried sometime in the medieval period, their arms laid at their sides, their graves oriented northeast to southwest, in what appears to have been a properly organised graveyard.
That a formal burial ground existed on Dalkey Island at all is the quietly arresting detail here. The island is uninhabited today, and the presence of a laid-out cemetery, rather than scattered or improvised burials, points to a community that once treated this windswept outcrop as a place of permanent, organised life.
The burial ground sits in the northwest of the island, to the north of St. Begnet's Church, a proximity that makes theological sense. Medieval burial grounds in Ireland were almost invariably associated with ecclesiastical sites, and the church on Dalkey Island, dedicated to the early Irish saint Begnet, provided the spiritual anchor for the surrounding community. When archaeologist Liversage excavated the site in 1958, eleven burials were uncovered in total. Four of these belonged to the regularly laid-out section of the graveyard, interred in reasonably deep graves with a consistent northeast to southwest orientation, a pattern common in Christian burial practice of the medieval period. The remaining burials were less formally arranged, which may suggest different phases of use or different categories of burial. Liversage's findings were published in 1968, and the site has been compiled and documented more recently by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy.
Dalkey Island is accessible by short boat trips that run from Coliemore Harbour in Dalkey village, though crossings depend on weather and season, and it is worth checking locally before making the journey. Once on the island, the ruined shell of St. Begnet's Church is relatively easy to locate, and the burial ground lies to its north. There is little formal signage or demarcation on the island, so a general sense of orientation helps. The site itself is unexcavated in any visible sense now, the ground having been returned to its undisturbed appearance after the 1958 dig, so what a visitor sees is largely open ground rather than exposed archaeology.
