In 1916, a man named Paddy Healy was digging in the back garden of No. 97 Lower Mount Street when he turned up a carved stone slab, decorated on both faces with ringed crosses. That discovery, made in the middle of a garden in one of Dublin's most recognisable residential streets, offered a quiet reminder that the city's layers run far deeper than its Georgian fabric suggests.

The slab is dated to roughly the 9th or 10th century, placing it firmly within the Early Christian period of Irish history, a time when ringed crosses, the precursor form to the elaborate high crosses found at monastic sites across the country, were a common decorative motif on grave markers. The fact that both faces of the stone were carved is notable; it suggests some care and intention in its making, rather than a simple field marker. The circumstances of its original burial and the identity of whoever lay beneath it are now unknown. What the discovery does indicate is that this part of Dublin, so thoroughly reshaped by later centuries of building, once had a spiritual or funerary significance that has since been almost entirely erased from the landscape. The find is catalogued in a 2009 edited volume by K. Swords.

The slab itself is no longer in situ, having been transferred to the National Museum of Ireland, where it can be examined properly. The garden of No. 97 Lower Mount Street is private property, and there is nothing visible at the original find spot to mark what came up from the soil there. For anyone interested in early medieval Dublin, the museum is the place to go; the slab sits within a collection that rewards careful attention, particularly for those who want to see how such modest, worn stones connected ordinary burial practice to the broader visual culture of early Christian Ireland.