Burial, Irelands Eye, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Burial Sites
A short boat ride from Howth Harbour lies Ireland's Eye, a small uninhabited island that holds, among its ruins, a question that nature has largely swallowed whole.
Near the remains of an early medieval church, there may or may not be a cemetery. The overgrowth around the structure reaches waist height, dense enough to make any surface survey essentially impossible, and so the ground beneath remains unread.
The question of burial here is not purely speculative. In 1868, stone coffins were uncovered at the site, a discovery recorded independently by Wakeman in 1892 and by Cochrane in both 1893 and 1896. Stone coffins of this kind, sometimes called cist burials or grave-liners depending on their construction, were used across early Christian Ireland and are frequently associated with monastic or ecclesiastical enclosures. Their presence on Ireland's Eye points to a site of some significance, though the published record offers little more than the bare fact of the find. No full excavation appears to have followed, and whatever the coffins contained or confirmed was not widely documented in the sources that survive.
Access to Ireland's Eye is by boat from Howth, with seasonal ferry services running during the warmer months. The island is uninhabited and largely unfenced, so there are no formal paths to the church ruin, and the vegetation that defeated earlier surveyors has not been cleared. Visitors who make their way to the ecclesiastical remains should expect rough ground and, depending on the season, exactly the kind of dense growth that makes the burial question so difficult to resolve. The coffins themselves are long gone from the surface, and what remains above ground is the church shell, the surrounding tangle, and the open possibility that the island holds considerably more than it currently shows.