One was laid inside a hearth. Another was found in a gully alongside a large quantity of butchered animal bone, his hands positioned over his face. A third had a decorated bone comb placed on the right side of his chest. These are not the orderly burials of a settled Christian community. They are something older, stranger, and considerably more martial.

Pre-development excavations at 52-57 Great George's Street South and 56-67 Stephen Street Lower brought these burials to light, with the findings published by archaeologist Linzi Simpson in 2006. All five were young males. The grave goods are telling: one burial contained a well-preserved iron shield boss, the domed metal fitting fixed to the centre of a wooden shield to protect the warrior's hand, along with a tanged knife dagger. Another skeleton had the remains of an iron object on his chest, its precise nature unclear. The burials are interpreted as warriors connected to the longphort established by the Vikings in AD 841. A longphort was a defended ship-camp or fortress, typically built close to water, used as both a military base and a staging point for raids further inland. Dublin's longphort is generally understood to have preceded the permanent Hiberno-Norse settlement that grew into the medieval city. By the late twelfth century, the ground above these men had been turned over to cultivation, the burials forgotten beneath whatever fields or gardens then occupied the site.

There is nothing to mark the spot today. The address falls within a busy section of Dublin's south inner city, long since built over and rebuilt again. The significance of the location lies entirely beneath the surface, or rather in the archive, since the excavated material and Simpson's report represent the primary record. Visitors with an interest in Viking Dublin are better served by the nearby Wood Quay area or the National Museum of Ireland, where artefacts from the broader Hiberno-Norse period are held. But knowing that this particular stretch of pavement once covered five warrior graves, one of them dug into a hearth, gives the street a different quality entirely.