County: Dublin Site name: Kill Abbey Graveyard, Kill of the Grange
Sites and Monuments Record No.: DU023–015 Licence number: E004003
Author: Antoine Giacometti, Arch-Tech Ltd, 32 Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin 2.
Site type: Human remains
Period/Dating: —
ITM: E 722604m, N 727257m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.281446, -6.161427
Monitoring took place at Kill Abbey church and graveyard (also known as Kill o’ the Grange Church), at Kill of the Grange, Co. Dublin. The monitoring concerned the removal of the foundation of the eastern boundary wall of the graveyard in order to rebuild it. This wall lies within the constraint zone of DU023–015 (ecclesiastical complex), which is also a national monument, and it separates the graveyard from the rear of the Abbey Court residential estate. The church is pre-Norman in date, but the eastern graveyard wall appears to have been built or rebuilt in the 19th or 20th century.
A 1m-wide and 0.7m-deep trench was excavated along the line of the wall foundation. The eastern edges of eleven cut features, probably graves, were identified along the eastern side of the wall foundation. All were cut into natural subsoil, which was noted at 0.7m from the surface, and all respected the line of the 19th/20th-century graveyard wall, suggesting that the wall may have preserved the line of the original extent of the graveyard. Human bone, probably disarticulated, was noted in three of the graves, whilst an iron coffin nail was noted in a fourth. None of the graves were excavated and all archaeological material was preserved in situ.
