Burial ground, Dublin North City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Burial Grounds
Somewhere beneath a path in Church Lane, in the north of Dublin city, two people have been lying undisturbed for an unknown stretch of centuries.
They came to light in 1941, when workers laying the path broke into their resting place, and then, largely, they were forgotten again. No headstone marks the spot. No plaque commemorates the find. The only public record of their discovery appears in a report published by the Evening Press in 1956, fifteen years after the fact, which is itself now a historical document.
The significance of the location is what gives the discovery its weight. The skeletons were found in the vicinity of an early ecclesiastical site, recorded in the Archaeological Survey of Ireland as DU018-005001. Early ecclesiastical sites, meaning the remains of early medieval church foundations and their associated enclosures, were typically the focal points of their communities, and burial close to such a site was deliberate and meaningful. The dead were placed near the holy ground as an act of devotion or affiliation. Who these two individuals were, when they lived, and how they came to be buried here rather than within the main enclosure is not known from the available record. The 1941 discovery was not accompanied by any formal archaeological investigation, and the skeletons were recorded only incidentally, their existence preserved in a newspaper column rather than an excavation report.
There is nothing to see at ground level today. The site sits in a built-up part of the north city, and the archaeology, if any survives, lies beneath the surface of an ordinary urban street. For anyone curious enough to visit, the interest lies less in what is visible and more in what the pavement conceals. The wider ecclesiastical site reference, DU018-005001, can be explored through the National Monuments Service online database, which holds the formal record. The note compiled by archaeologist Geraldine Stout and uploaded to that record in September 2011 remains one of the few places where the 1941 find is formally acknowledged at all.