Burial ground, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Burial Grounds
Beneath an ordinary Dublin street address, the remains of 84 people lay undisturbed for centuries before a construction project brought them back into the light.
The address, numbers 34 to 36 Francis Street in the south city, gives little away today, but what was uncovered there in 1994 pointed toward one of the area's long-vanished religious foundations and the community of the dead it once kept.
The excavation was carried out by archaeologist Alan Hayden, and the finds that accompanied the burials helped place them in their historical context. Medieval pottery and floor tiles were recovered alongside the skeletal remains, material culture that suggested the cemetery belonged to a Franciscan friary. The Franciscans, a mendicant order founded in the thirteenth century, established houses across medieval Irish towns, and their friaries typically served as places of burial for both friars and lay patrons who wished to be interred close to a religious community. The Francis Street area of Dublin, with its name carrying an obvious resonance, sits in the Liberties, a district with deep medieval roots, and the association between the street name and a Franciscan presence in the vicinity has long been noted by local historians. Hayden's findings, recorded under excavation reference 94E0019 and published in the Excavations series for 1994, gave that association a firm archaeological footing.
Francis Street today is a busy thoroughfare known largely for its antique dealers and furniture shops, and there is nothing at street level to mark what was found at numbers 34 to 36. The site itself is not publicly accessible in any formal sense, and there is no monument or interpretive signage to indicate the discovery. For anyone interested in the archaeology of medieval Dublin, the published excavation record is the most direct way to engage with the find. The Excavations database, which compiles licensed archaeological investigations in Ireland, holds the original summary, and the National Museum of Ireland may hold associated material. The Liberties more broadly rewards slow walking; the street grid preserves much of its medieval shape, and the density of ecclesiastical remains across this part of the city makes the underground history feel closer to the surface than it might otherwise seem.