2024:869 - St Mary's Church, Crumlin, Dublin 12, Dublin

A programme of archaeological monitoring of conservation works at St Mary’s Graveyard, Crumlin, Dublin 12 took place in 2024. It follows on from a 2023 Conservation Plan of the church by the author which identified the church tower as a medieval western residential tower, an architectural feature of fourteenth/fifteenth-century date, most common within the Pale and other areas of Anglo-Norman control in Later Medieval Ireland. Based on this comparative assessment, an early fifteenth-century date is suggested for the construction of the tower.

The 2024 works were for repairs to the church facades, and roofs to vestry and chancel. Most of these works were on the nineteenth-century church and had no archaeological impact. These have been documented by the conservation architect. The works on the medieval tower involved the cleaning and repointing of the exterior tower walls, and the repair of the steps leading to the exterior door of the tower.

 The only significant finding from the monitoring programme was the identification of at least nine reused stones in the upper exterior northern façade of the tower, at parapet wall height, which are from a grave monument or gravestone, window or door frame, and which were placed in the wall during the 1980s reconstruction.