Graveyard, Kill Of The Grange, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Burial Grounds
Two stone crosses once stood at the entrance to this graveyard on the south Dublin coast, marking a laneway that worshippers and mourners would have walked for centuries.
Those crosses are no longer here; they were removed to the care of the Office of Public Works in Trim, County Meath, leaving the site quietly diminished but still dense with early Christian material. What remains within the walled enclosure is a layered accumulation spanning well over a millennium, from a pre-Norman church and its late medieval chancel addition through to a holy well, a bullaun stone, two carved cross-slabs, a stone font, and the base of yet another lost cross. A bullaun stone is a large boulder with one or more rounded depressions, probably used for grinding or as a vessel in ritual contexts; their presence on ecclesiastical sites is common but not fully understood. The graveyard itself is irregular in shape, running roughly 41.8 metres north to south and 78 metres east to west, sitting on a low rise northeast of Kill Abbey road.
The name Kill derives from the Irish cill, meaning a church or monastic cell, suggesting a Christian foundation here in the early medieval period. That foundation appears to reach back further than the stonework visible today. In January and February 2018, a rescue excavation at St. Fintan's Park, just north of the graveyard boundary wall, was carried out by Paul Duffy of Irish Archaeology Consultancy Ltd to facilitate the laying of a drainage pipe. The dig uncovered two parallel ditches running northwest to southeast. One contained medieval pottery; the other held a burial and deposits of animal bone. Osteological analysis confirmed the remains of at least two individuals, and the burial activity was dated to the early medieval period, somewhere between the 5th and 7th centuries AD. The graveyard complex is recorded as National Monument 207, and the site has been documented by researchers including Wakeman in 1891 and Ball in 1902.
The graveyard lies northeast of Kill Abbey road in the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown area, set within a green space that can appear unremarkable from the road. The walled enclosure contains the church ruin and associated features, and visitors who take the time to look carefully will find the bullaun stone, the cross-slabs, and the font among the burial markers. The holy well associated with the complex is also recorded within the site. Bear in mind that the two crosses referenced in the records are absent, held in Trim, so what you see on the ground is an incomplete picture of what was once here. The surrounding area of St. Fintan's Park carries its own significance now, given that early medieval burials lie beneath ordinary suburban ground just beyond the northern wall.
