Burial ground, Dublin North City, Co. Dublin

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Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Dublin North City, Co. Dublin

When construction workers broke ground for the Bon Secours Hospital in Dublin's north city in 1951, they uncovered something that briefly interrupted the work: a set of burials, lying undisturbed beneath what was about to become a medical facility.

The discovery was enough to bring A. T. Lucas of the National Museum to the site for inspection, though the circumstances of the find, the number of individuals, their age, or any associated material, remain unrecorded in the available sources.

Lucas, who would later become Director of the National Museum of Ireland, was a respected figure in mid-twentieth-century Irish archaeology, and his involvement signals that the discovery was taken seriously at the time. However, subsequent attempts to learn more about the burials produced little. Excavations carried out in the vicinity of the hospital in 1989 and again in 1996 found no archaeological features, according to reports compiled by Mc Mahon and Carroll respectively. The burials uncovered in 1951 appear to have been isolated, or at least confined to the area disturbed during the original foundation work, with nothing further surfacing in the ground around them.

There is no monument to visit here in any conventional sense. The hospital stands on the site, and the burials long since gave way to construction. What remains is largely a paper trail, a brief inspection note, two inconclusive excavation reports, and a record compiled by archaeologist Geraldine Stout and held in the sites and monuments database. For anyone tracing the buried archaeology of Dublin's northside, this entry serves as a reminder of how much has been absorbed into the fabric of the modern city, encountered for a moment during a building project, noted, and then built over.

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