Why I wrote Viking Dublin: the Wood Quay Excavations by Patrick Wallace

The carved beast on the cover of the Wood Quay book – with the dirt of the site still clogging its nostrils – is a perfect example of conveying the immediacy of a discovery.

Or the clay crucible that cracked and was thrown away with a cooled lead weight inside. The spicules of amber from one of the Fishamble Street yards which seem to have been walked out on the feet of the carver from the building where he made beads, rings and pendants also bring us closer to that time and place.

And did the grain beetles found in Fishamble Street come in from outside Ireland or were they then propagating here to die out later? Why were Saxon silver coin hoards concealed in Castle Street and why were they never retrieved?

I have spent the past 10 years or so trying to write a book on the Wood Quay excavations in an accessible, unpatronising style so that the results of this huge project can be communicated to the wider public, not just the strictly academic readership. It is important to continue to engage with the thousands who marched behind Father FX Martin to “Save Wood Quay” if we are to foster an interest in our archaeological heritage. Anyway, to me at least, the results are so exciting that they cry out to be shared and discussed.

We know more about Dublin around the year 1000 than we do of almost any other European town of the time, London and Paris included. Building foundations of the era of Brian Boru were unearthed in their dozens. The earthen defensive embankments behind which Brian’s rival, Sitric the King of Dublin, and his men allegedly crouched during the Battle of Clontarf were revealed. So was the later 11th-century town wall and the wooden docksides of the Anglo-Normans. Nine waterfronts altogether.

The result is that in spite of the often heroic efforts of many of the post Wood Quay archaeologists, very little now remains of the rich layers which earned Dublin such international fame. In less than half a century, we managed to destroy in one way or another the best preserved urban archaeological remains of any town in Western Europe.

Now except for the banks of archaeological build-up under the street network within the old walled area of the early medieval town, precious little of it remains. This is what makes the results recorded at Wood Quay even more important than they should have been. Hurried and in some ways compromised though these excavations were, at least they give a good idea of what that area of the early town once looked like.

Apart from discharging a 40-year-old obligation to provide an overview of the results of the Dublin excavations, my desire is to communicate the results of our work to a new generation unfamiliar with the almost daily unearthing of richly preserved fresh evidence of Viking and Anglo-Norman Dublin.

There are other reasons for writing the book. These include a desire to rejuvenate interest in the earliest Irish evidence for urbanism and town life; a hope for a fuller return to the teaching of urban archaeology in university and school courses; and, especially, an ambition to inspire the Government to provide the necessary resources for full publication of all the results of the excavations and the related corpuses of finds.

It is felt best at this juncture to present my assesment of the findings in a hopefully concerted, concentrated and unified view, which also provides something of the immediacy of our operation on the ground. This is an attempt to place this on record while it is still possible, while impressions formed on the site are still relatively fresh in the memory. Sites written up or even concluded by others never have the informed impressions formed at the coal face of excavation.

Finally, if this is the book of evidence FX Martin lacked in the courtroom when making his case for the importance of the site, it is surely a vindication of his and others’ belief in the need for the excavations.

[ Viking Dublin: The Wood Quay Excavations is published by Irish Academic Press, €60 ]