County: Dublin Site name: DUBLIN: Davis Place (Off Francis Street)
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 99E00452
Author: Helen Kehoe, c/o Margaret Gowen & Co. Ltd.
Site type: Burial
Period/Dating: Post Medieval (AD 1600-AD 1750)
ITM: E 714899m, N 733697m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.341015, -6.274581
A second phase of archaeological assessment was carried out at Davis Place, Dublin 8, in August 1999. Davis Place is off Thomas Davis Street South, which runs between Francis Street (west) and John Dillon Street (east). The site is within the city ward of St Nicholas Without. A preliminary assessment was undertaken by Malachy Conway before a planning submission in the vacant garden area on the north side of the site in January 1997 (Excavations 1997, 40, 96E0374), from which 'nothing of archaeological significance was revealed in this small area of investigation'.
According to Clarke's Map of Dublin, c. AD 840–1540, the site is just outside the medieval walled town of Dublin and is on or close to the site of St Francis's Abbey, founded in 1233.
Two trenches were opened, and human remains were found at two locations in both. The remains consisted of both articulated and disarticulated material and were not associated with medieval soils or structures from within the boundaries of the trenches. The finds retrieved from the soil deposit, from which the bone emerged, were post-medieval.
It would appear that some remains were redeposited or disturbed at an earlier date, as the position of the human remains just underneath the rubble infill conveyed the impression of earlier disturbance. An example was the disarticulated bones of the young adult found in Trench 1, with much of the skeletal remains, including the skull, missing.
2 Killiney View, Albert Road Lower, Glenageary, Co. Dublin
