2010:276 - Holy Faith Convent, Glasnevin, Dublin

Two trenches were mechanically excavated across a proposed Spirituality Centre on the lawn to the south of the Holy Faith Convent building, in an area adjacent to DU018–04, designated as an earthwork on the RMP. The trenches were located to identify and quantify the presence or otherwise of archaeological material relating to the monument, or indeed the early ecclesiastical site associated with St Mobhi, which forms the historic village centre of Glasnevin. Consideration was also given to the archaeology of the designed landscape of Glasnevin Demesne, which has existed since at least 1756.
The original house was built on the elevated site above the Tolka for Sir John Rogerson (1648–1724). A politician, merchant and promiscuous property developer, Rogerson operated throughout the newly developing suburbs and was instrumental in the development of the sloblands between Ringsend and Trinity College. He represented Clogher in parliament from 1692 to 1693 and was elected Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1693–4, representing the city from 1695 to 1703. Rogerson’s country residence appears to have comprised the eastern end of the convent built by Margaret Aylward from 1865. Although small in footprint on the evidence of the first-edition 6-inch OS map, it must have had a significant presence on the landscape, given its location. The demesne may have been walled, with a watchtower depicted on the eastern boundary by the OS in 1837, which had disappeared by the turn of the 20th century; its foundations may yet survive under the pavement at Creemore Lawn.
Aylward’s arrival on the scene was perhaps 140 years too late for Archbishop King, who opined that ‘Glasnevin was the receptacle for thieves and rogues. The first search when anything was stolen, was there, and when any couple had a mind to retire to be wicked there was their harbour’ (Mant, 1841). Aylward’s presence on the site came just two years after the purchase of Rogerson’s demesne by the Sacred Heart sisters. She renamed the school St Brigid’s and the school served as St Brigid’s primary school in Glasnevin for the next 100 years. The school grew and expanded until the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a growing suburban population called for increasing accommodation. This new school project was undertaken again by the Holy Faith sisters and the current St Brigid’s school building was blessed and officially opened by Bishop Kavanagh on 3 February 1976.
The earthwork is invisible on the ground today and not evident on aerial images. First depicted c. 1838 on the 1st edition of the OS 6-inch mapping, the monument presents as a circle, of perhaps some 20m in diameter, located within a heavily landscaped environment occupying the entire townland of Glasnevin Demesne, which extended to the west along the northern bank of the Tolka. Where the western third of the townland has been eaten up by housing, its extent is still evident as a property boundary to the rear of properties on Creemore Lawn and on properties along Violet Hill Park and Road. The monument is not depicted on the 25-inch map, which was surveyed by 1907, and may simply have constituted a circular flowerbed or a tree, removed as the area became part of a home farm attached to the convent. Consideration is owed, however, to this aspect of the site’s archaeology as part of a formal garden which had been laid out prior to John Rocque’s 1756 survey, many elements of which survived on to the 19th-century landscape. It was hoped the assessment might have uncovered evidence for the formal gardens concealed below the present lawn. In any event, nothing of archaeological significance was recovered and it is thus likely that the feature depicted on the OS constituted a surface garden feature.
Reference
Mant, R. 1841 History of the Church of Ireland. Dublin.