Burial ground, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

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Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

When excavators working near a south Dublin church in 1999 uncovered the remains of twenty individuals lying in careful articulation, they were not simply finding old graves.

They were locating a medieval burial horizon that had survived, largely unrecognised, beneath the foundations and cellars of later construction, its western edge still marked by a stone boundary wall roughly 1.2 metres wide.

The site has a layered history that reaches back well before the Victorian building that stands there today. The parish church of St Peter's, built between 1863 and 1867 as a T-shaped structure with a north transept and galleries, occupied ground that had already served a religious purpose for centuries. The land itself had been donated by Francis Aungier in 1680, but archaeology suggests the ecclesiastical use of the site predates that by a considerable margin. The 1999 excavation, carried out under licence reference 97E0094, recovered not only the inhumations but also medieval pottery and line-impressed floor tiles, the latter a type of decorated ceramic used in church interiors during the medieval period. These materials had been disturbed and deposited in later cellars, where they survived as residual finds, displaced from their original context but still legible as evidence. The wall and the cemetery have been provisionally identified as belonging to the medieval parish church of St Peter, a predecessor institution to the Victorian building above.

The site sits within Dublin's south city and is not publicly accessible as a heritage site in any formal sense; the archaeology lies beneath existing structures rather than being visible at ground level. Anyone with an interest in the excavation findings can consult the published summary by M. Reid (2000) or the National Monuments Service record compiled by Geraldine Stout, which draws together the documentary and physical evidence for what appears to be a medieval parish burial ground quietly preserved beneath one of the city's older urban streetscapes.

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