Burial ground, Lambay Island, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Burial Grounds
On the south-western tip of Lambay Island, a few kilometres off the Dublin coast, a patch of ground holds the remains of six people buried together around the year 1500.
What makes the discovery unusual is not simply the age of the graves, but the composition of the group: five young adult males and an adolescent, interred as a single deposit. Who they were, and why they ended up buried together in this remote spot, has not been definitively answered.
The grave was uncovered during excavations in 1995, with findings published by Gabriel Cooney in 1996. The multiple burial dated to approximately 1500 AD, placing it in the late medieval period, a time when Lambay, though small and isolated, sat within the broader sphere of Dublin's maritime activity. When researchers returned to the site in 2002, they identified a second, separate grave nearby. This one contained a single individual, laid out in an extended east-west inhumation, the orientation being the conventional Christian burial posture with the head to the west. Alongside the lower right limb bones, excavators found a fragment of textile and an iron rivet cap, small objects that hint at clothing or wrapped material, though their precise significance remains unclear. Cooney reported the findings in 2003.
Lambay is a private island, owned by the Baring family, and public access is not generally permitted without prior arrangement. The island lies roughly five kilometres from Rush on the north Dublin coast, and any visit would depend on securing permission from the landowners. The burial site sits toward the south-western end of the island, away from the main house and anchorage. For those with a particular interest in late medieval archaeology, the combination of the multiple grave and the later individual inhumation makes this a genuinely unusual site, the kind of place that raises more questions than it resolves.