One designed some of the most celebrated buildings in Georgian Dublin; the other catalogued the antiquities of Britain and Ireland with an obsessive eye. That both ended up in the same quiet churchyard, attached to a building that itself stands on nearly a thousand years of layered religious history, gives the place an unlikely density of significance.

The Church of St. John the Baptist, built in 1734, occupies a site with roots stretching back to a medieval Augustinian foundation, the Priory of All Saints. Following the Dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, the priory was suppressed, and a smaller church dedicated to St. Margaret was erected in its place, as recorded by the historian F. E. Ball. The 1734 church came later still, replacing or absorbing what had come before. It is in the graveyard attached to this building that James Gandon, the architect responsible for the Custom House and the Four Courts among other major Dublin landmarks, is buried. Beside him, in a manner of speaking, lies Francis Grose, the antiquarian whose fieldwork across Ireland in the early 1790s produced detailed records of ancient monuments and ruins at a time when such documentation was rare. Grose died in Dublin in 1791, mid-project, which lends his presence here a certain poignancy.

The graveyard sits within the All Hallows College campus, now part of Dublin City University, on Grace Park Road in Drumcondra. Access to the grounds is generally possible during college opening hours, though it is worth confirming arrangements before visiting. The church itself is a relatively plain eighteenth-century structure, and the graveyard is not extensively signposted, so a degree of patience in locating specific graves is advisable. The site rewards those who arrive knowing what to look for rather than expecting obvious markers or interpretation panels.