Graveyard, Dublin North City, Co. Dublin

Co. Dublin |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Dublin North City, Co. Dublin

Beneath a stretch of north Dublin streetscape, the bones of hundreds of people lay undisturbed for centuries, their presence entirely unknown until a set of test excavations in 1999 brought them back into the light.

The site at 189 to 194 King Street yielded not only a large quantity of disarticulated remains, meaning bones no longer in their original anatomical position, likely disturbed by later burials or ground disturbance, but also approximately 430 articulated skeletons, individuals whose remains were still laid out more or less as they had been at the time of burial. That figure, recovered from what is now an ordinary urban address, points to a burial ground of considerable scale and long use.

The historical record offers a thread worth following. The area in which King Street sits was recorded as Abbey Green in 1558, a name that connects it to one of medieval Dublin's most significant religious institutions. St Mary's Abbey, a Cistercian house founded in the twelfth century, received a grant of land from the city in 1213, and the King Street burial ground appears to fall within that grant. The abbey was, at its height, among the wealthiest and most influential monasteries in Ireland, and its lands extended across a substantial portion of what is now the north inner city. A burial ground attached to or associated with such an institution would have served the religious community and potentially the lay population connected to it over many generations.

The site itself is not marked or accessible in any meaningful way to a visitor today; it lies beneath and around existing buildings on King Street North, in a part of the city that has seen considerable development over the decades. The significance of what was found here is held primarily in the archaeological record, particularly the report by Nelis published in 2000. For those interested in the medieval layers of Dublin, the broader area rewards exploration, with the partial remains of St Mary's Abbey itself visible nearby on Meetinghouse Lane, where a vaulted chapter house, the only surviving above-ground remnant of the complex, is occasionally open to the public.

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