Qualla: Kilmainham

Kilmainham: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Dig anywhere in Kilmainham and you hit history. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when navvies cut railway lines through the slopes above the Liffey, when gravel quarries opened, when the Irish National War Memorial Gardens were graded for planting, the spades came up with bones. Dozens of pagan burials, each one wrapped around the personal grave goods a Viking warrior expected to need in the next world. Taken together with finds at Islandbridge across the river, this is the largest known Viking cemetery in western Europe outside Scandinavia. The dead have been there since the ninth century, waiting for someone to need a railway, or a war memorial, before introducing themselves.

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Image: David Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kilmainham: St Maighneann's Church

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit IrishFlyFisher, CC BY-SA 2.0. The place takes its name from Cell Maignenn - in modern Irish, Cill Mhaighneann, meaning the church of Saint Maighneann - a Christian monastery established by the year 606 on the ridge of land where the River Camac meets the Liffey. By 795 the ecclesiastical site may still have b...

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Image: IrishFlyFisher | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kilmainham: Sitric, Niall, and a Battle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marathon, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Vikings settled Dublin from 841, and Kilmainham was one of a string of villages that stretched up the riverbank to Clondalkin. They did not always remain peacefully. In 919 the Battle of Islandbridge was fought near here between Viking forces under Sitric Caech and Gaelic Iri...

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Image: Marathon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kilmainham: Royal Hospital, Old Soldiers' Home

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. Where the Knights Hospitaller had their priory, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham now stands - a vast classical building completed in 1684 on the model of Les Invalides in Paris, originally a retirement home for elderly and wounded soldiers of the British army in Ireland. The arched,...

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Image: Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kilmainham: The Gaol

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marathon, CC BY-SA 2.0. A short walk from the Royal Hospital stands Kilmainham Gaol, opened in 1796. Among its inmates over the years were Robert Emmet, the Young Irelanders, the Fenians, the Land League leaders, Charles Stewart Parnell, Eamon de Valera. The gaol is most associated with the executions t...

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Image: Marathon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kilmainham: Memorial Gardens

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marathon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Just along the riverbank from the gaol, where the gravel quarries once exposed Viking bones, the Irish National War Memorial Gardens commemorate the 49,400 Irish soldiers who died fighting in the British forces during the First World War. Designed by Edwin Lutyens - the same Luty...

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Image: Marathon | CC BY-SA 2.0