The bones they found were not alone. They came with weapons, swords and spears, and were enclosed within a large rectangular trench cut deep into the earth.

The discovery dates to the eighteenth century, when construction work across North Great George's Street, Summerhill, Gardiners Row, and Mountjoy Square disturbed what appears to have been a deliberate, organised burial. The antiquarian Edward Ledwich recorded the find in 1763 and proposed an interpretation that still lingers over the site: that these were casualties of the Battle of Clontarf, fought in 1014 rather than Ledwich's stated 1012, when the High King Brian Boru defeated a Viking and Leinster alliance on the shores north of Dublin. Mass graves associated with medieval battles were not uncommon; the dead were often collected and interred in communal pits, sometimes enclosed by a trench or earthwork. The rectangular form noted by Ledwich suggests some degree of organisation in how the burials were arranged, pointing to a deliberate rather than hasty disposal of the dead.

There is nothing physically to see today. The streets above the site are fully built over, and the burial ground exists now only in the documentary record. Anyone curious about the area might walk the length of North Great George's Street or look out across Mountjoy Square and consider that the foundations of these Georgian buildings, constructed during one of Dublin's great periods of urban expansion, rest on ground that may have served as a battlefield cemetery some seven centuries earlier. The National Museum of Ireland, a short distance away on Kildare Street, holds extensive collections relating to Viking-age Dublin and the Clontarf period, and provides useful context for what Ledwich recorded but could not fully explain.