14–17 Hanbury Lane in the Liberties in 2003, they found themselves, quite literally, in someone's graveyard. The bones that turned up during archaeological monitoring, fragments of two right tibiae and a right humerus belonging to at least two adults, were not lying in any formal burial layer. They were loose within cellar debris, unstratified and displaced, the remnants of a medieval burial ground that the city had quietly built over without anyone quite noticing where the edges were.

The site sits immediately to the east of St. Catherine's Church on Thomas Street, a Georgian building dating to 1769 that replaced a medieval parish church whose origins stretch back to at least the early thirteenth century. The earliest written reference to a church here appears in the Crede Mihi, a register of the Diocese of Dublin compiled between 1212 and 1225. That church was subsequently appropriated, first to the Augustinian priory of St. Thomas's Abbey and later to the Earls of Meath, a pattern of ecclesiastical land passing into aristocratic hands that was common in post-medieval Ireland. The graveyard to the south of the present church still holds memorials ranging from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, but the 2003 monitoring, carried out by archaeologist Judith Carroll under licence 03E0439, confirmed what a 1973 discovery had already hinted at: the boundary wall enclosing that graveyard does not mark the full extent of the original burial ground. In 1973, the National Museum of Ireland recorded human bones belonging to three adult males and one child found beneath the pavement directly outside the church's front entrance. By the early eighteenth century, according to Charles Brooking's map of Dublin, the Hanbury Lane site had already been developed for housing, meaning the graves had been built over before anyone was keeping careful records.

The church itself stands on Thomas Street and is accessible on foot from the city centre. The walled graveyard to its south contains legible memorials, some dating to the 1500s, and is worth a slow walk for anyone interested in the material texture of early modern Dublin. The broader point, that the burial ground once extended well beyond what the wall now encloses, is invisible to a casual visitor, which is perhaps what makes it worth knowing about before you arrive.