Burial, Kilmore Big, Co. Dublin

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Burial Sites

Burial, Kilmore Big, Co. Dublin

There is a burial site somewhere in Kilmore Big, on the northern fringes of Dublin, and nobody is entirely certain where it is.

That ambiguity is not a gap waiting to be filled; it is, at this point, simply the nature of the place. Two individuals lie somewhere beneath what was once an active construction zone, and the precise coordinates of their resting place have been lost to the paperwork and disruption that so often accompany accidental discovery.

In 1990, construction works in the area broke into something unexpected. Within the exposed section of a trench, two human burials became visible, oriented west to east, which is the alignment most commonly associated with Christian burial practice, the body laid with the head to the west so that it would rise facing east at the resurrection. No grave markers, no enclosing structures, and no associated artefacts were found alongside the remains. That absence makes dating or contextualising the burials almost impossible; without objects or surrounding features, there is little to anchor them to a particular period or community. The remains were handed over to the city coroner and passed to the National Museum of Ireland, which is the standard procedure when human bones surface unexpectedly during ground works in the Republic. The site was compiled by archaeologist Geraldine Stout and added to the record in August 2011.

For anyone hoping to visit, there is an honest difficulty: the exact location is not known. Kilmore Big itself sits within the broader Kilmore area of north Dublin, a landscape that has been substantially developed over recent decades, which may partly explain why the precise findspot was never firmly established or has since become unverifiable. The site exists, then, more as a recorded event than as a locatable place; two people were found, their remains were removed and documented, and the ground that held them carries on unmarked. It is a common enough fate for archaeological discoveries made in the middle of active building work, where the priority is rarely the careful notation of coordinates.

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Pete F
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Kilmore Big, Co. Dublin
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Ref: DU04153

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