This old road or trackway running between Donnybrook and Merrion, in what is now the south Dublin suburb of Donnybrook West, is one of those traces that survives only in the cartographic record, its original course and character long since absorbed by later development.

The earliest named reference comes from John Taylor's map, The Environs of Dublin, published in 1816, where the route is recorded as Churchyard Lane, a name that almost certainly reflects proximity to a burial ground in the area. By 1821, when William Duncan produced his own map of the region, the same route appears again, this time without the name but still legible as a distinct road connecting Donnybrook to Merrion. That both mapmakers recorded it within a few years of each other suggests it was a functioning and reasonably well-known thoroughfare in the early nineteenth century, rather than a minor field path. The name itself belongs to a tradition of Dublin lane nomenclature that was largely swept away as the city expanded outward during the Victorian period and beyond, replacing older, descriptive placenames with more regularised street addresses.

For anyone interested in tracing it today, the exercise is largely one of comparison, setting a reproduction or digitised version of Taylor's 1816 map or Duncan's 1821 map against a modern street plan to identify where the original line of the lane might have run. Both maps are held in Irish institutional collections and are accessible online through various digitisation projects. The area around Donnybrook has changed considerably since the early nineteenth century, with the construction of roads, housing, and institutional buildings having altered the landscape substantially, so physical traces of the lane itself are unlikely to be obvious on the ground. The interest here is less in what can be seen and more in what the name Churchyard Lane implies about the earlier character of this part of south County Dublin, before it became the continuous suburban fabric it is today.