Introduction Esker, Lucan, is a medieval landscape hidden in suburbia, and traces of its past are not hard to find. Within a few hundred yards of each other stand Ireland’s oldest (purportedly) extant bridge, the site of a medieval royal manor house and court (with the location of possible medieval fishponds still visible) and an Anglo-Norman church site—the medieval church and graveyard of St Finian.

Lucan, Co. Dublin (pop. 55,000 in 2022), is a suburb located roughly 15km from Dublin city centre. It has an interesting range of archaeological sites, from prehistoric to industrial; as many are on private land, however, heritage awareness is still at the lower end of the scale. This is changing, owing in part to the work of the Society for Old Lucan (SOL), whose goal is to conserve, research and promote Lucan’s local history, heritage, archaeology and folklore.

St Finian’s medieval church and graveyard is owned and managed by South Dublin County Council (SDCC), which supported the work undertaken by the SOL under the Heritage Council’s ‘Adopt a Monument’ scheme.

St Finian’s church St Finian’s is just one of three extant medieval churches in the Lucan area, each the focus of a parish, in the barony of Newcastle. The other two are Aderrig, situated in farmland surrounded by housing development, and St Mary’s, in the centre of Lucan village.

St Finian’s is 1km from Lucan village and is said to have been built in the twelfth century. It is a ruined medieval parish church and graveyard, constructed of rough limestone masonry, within a roughly trapezoidal nineteenth-century stone enclosure.

In medieval times St Finian’s held a strategic location on the Slíghe Mhór (the Great Way), the medieval road that crossed the country from Tara to Dublin, and thence to Clonard (of St Finian) and on to Galway. The Slíghe Mhór took advantage here of the stony, elevated esker from which the area derives its name.

Although St Finian’s church appears to date mainly from the Anglo-Norman period (from the thirteenth century on), with additions or revisions in the sixteenth century, an interesting band of ‘herringbone masonry’ on the interior of the north wall of the nave suggests a possible twelfth-century date for this part of the church. Only one other church in Ireland, at Killadreenan, Co. Wicklow, has this feature (Corlett 2015).

Top: St Finian’s, looking south-east. Above: Overhead view of St Finian’s.