What is recorded here

Fifty to sixty bodies, including children, lay aligned northwest to southeast inside stone-lined cists beneath a low hillock in Townparks. Railway men dragged them into daylight in 1879 and 1880 while cutting a path for steel wheels and workshop smoke. The dead had no gifts, no markers, no names, only crushed stone beneath their bones and a direction they all shared. They had waited patiently under grass for centuries, then lost their privacy to a train that never paused to remember them.

The following description is derived from both the published 'Archaeological Inventory of County Louth' (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1986) and the 'Archaeological Survey of County Louth' (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1991). In certain instances the entries have been revised and updated in the light of recent research. Date of upload/revision: 17 July 2007 Discovered during the sinking of a trial pit by the Great Northern Railway in 1879 prior to the building of workshops. The site consisted of a slight hillock (max. H c. 3m). The first burial was found c. 0.6m below the surface while sinking the trial pit. In 1880 it was decided to remove the hillock completely and between fifty and sixty burials were uncovered. They were all orientated NW-SE, were at an average depth of 0.45m below the topsoil, and were laid in regularly shaped stone-lined cists. The bases of the graves appeared to have had a lining of broken crushed stone. Some of the remains were of children. No finds were recovered from the burials. (CLAJ 1952, 251-2)

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