For 50 years, from about 795 AD, single-boat raiding parties of Norsemen carried out hit-and-run raids on the famous and wealthy monasteries which were scattered all over the country.

From the 830s more concentrated attacks were launched from fleets of 50 or more ships. The Vikings decided that to more fully exploit these rich pickings they would require more permanent settlements and so they built fortified harbours around the coast and along the major waterways of Ireland.

They arrived in strength to the estuary of the River Liffey in 841 and soon began to erect a recognisable urban centre. They erected a stockade around the Dubh Linn and this became their longphort or fortified harbour. Beside it they built houses in close order and surrounded these with a raised ditch and a wooden stockade. This was the genesis of Dublin.

Even though the Vikings routinely pillaged monasteries (as did the native Irish), it must be said that some co-existence emerged between the monastery at Dubh Linn and the Norsemen. Irish techniques and undoubtedly Irish craftsmen were employed to build the houses in Dyflin (as the Viking town came to be known), the excavated remains of which have been partially uncovered by archaeologists.

Indeed the area around the new Civic Offices on Wood Quay, which was excavated in the 1970s, yielded up the most extensive and best preserved foundations of any Viking and early medieval urban site in northern Europe.

Norman Conquerors

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