2008:475 - Church Road and St Joseph’s Avenue, Lusk, Dublin

Test-trenching was conducted in advance of service and road works for Phase II of the Lusk Traffic Management Plan by Fingal County Council. Eleven test-trenches were excavated along the routes of St Joseph’s Avenue and the eastern portion of Church Road.
No archaeological features were identified along St Joseph’s Avenue. This confirms the historical and cartographic sources, which suggested that this part of Lusk was undeveloped and situated outside of the outer medieval ecclesiastical enclosure, and outside of the town proper, until the beginning of the 19th century.
Church Road is situated in an area of significant archaeological potential. The testing programme here identified a concentration of archaeological features (in Trenches 5 and 6) which may extend over the full width of the road and cover some 40m in length in an area situated directly to the south of St Maccullin’s Church, round tower and graveyard (DU008–01002, –03, –04). No archaeological material was identified at the western end of Church Road.
The archaeological material identified in Trench 6 was not fully excavated but appeared to represent the well-preserved uppermost fills of a large ditch comprising of dense shell deposits, animal bone remains and sherds of 13th–14th-century pottery, which probably represent domestic waste. The minimum depth of 0.6m suggests it represents an intentionally cut feature rather than a backfilled depression. Based on its location, the feature may represent the early medieval monastic enclosure of Lusk (DU008–01006).
The ecclesiastical site at Lusk was supposedly founded as a monastery by St Maccullin in the later 5th century. The traces of the monastic site which survive in the curving routes of the street pattern and field boundaries around Church Road have led Stout and Stout (1992, 16) to observe that ‘Lusk is the best example of an Early Christian enclosure in the county’. This enclosure (DU008–01006) was probably defined by both a bank and a ditch, and enclosed ‘an area similar in size to some of the lesser Roman towns in England’ (ibid.) Stout and Stout further noted the presence of the round tower (DU008–01003) on the site of the present Church of Ireland church and stated that it ‘provides testimony to the wealth of ecclesiastical buildings which must have stood at this site’.
Very few examples of major ecclesiastical enclosures have been excavated in Ireland, so it is difficult to compare the findings here with previous examples. At Armagh, the inner enclosure of the ecclesiastical enclosure was found to measure some 6.4m in width and up to 3m in depth. At Lusk, Christine Baker’s excavations at the Chapel Farm Development (Excavations 2001, No. 449, 01E872) uncovered evidence for the outer enclosure of the ecclesiastical site. Interestingly, the artefacts recovered from that feature dated to the between the 10th and 14th centuries, suggesting that the outer enclosure had remained in use throughout the medieval period (Baker 2001, unpublished report).
Thus the relatively late date (c. 12th–14th century) of the pottery found in the features at Church Road should not preclude the possibility that the features are part of the early medieval enclosure. The importance of Lusk as a religious and economic centre continued long after the early medieval founding of the site, through the Viking, Anglo-Norman and high medieval periods. Throughout the Middle Ages, Lusk functioned as a manorial centre, as a local religious centre and as a centre for the cultivation and processing of agricultural produce. The presence of what appears to be domestic trash within the top of the possible ecclesiastical enclosure at Church Road is not particularly surprising, and indeed there are historical references to many secular activities, such as markets, held directly adjacent to the church and graveyard.
Reference
Stout, G. and Stout, M. 1992 Patterns in the past: County Dublin 5000 bc–1000 ad’. In F.H.A. Aalen and K. Whelan (eds), Dublin City and County: From Prehistory to Present, Geography Publications, 5–14. Dublin.