10th-11th century, nine floors
The Round Tower
The Lusk round tower was built in the 10th or 11th century and stands about 27 metres today, originally close to 32. Inside it carries nine floors counting the basement - the most of any round tower in Ireland - though those timber floors were added in the 19th century rather than being original. Like all round towers it was built partly as a refuge: the high door kept raiders out, and the monks valued not only the relics inside but their own skins, since Vikings took inhabitants for slave labour. Over the centuries the graveyard ground rose around it, and the door now sits less than a metre above the surface. In the early 16th century the tower stopped standing alone: a square medieval belfry was built around it, using the round tower as one of four corner towers and raising three matching turrets at the others. It is one of the few intact round towers left in County Dublin.
The founder, the raids, the fire of 1089
St MacCullin and the Vikings
St MacCullin founded a church at Lusk around 450 AD and died about 497, his feast kept on the 6th of September. The monastery that grew from it was wealthy enough to be a target, and the annals record it plundered and burned repeatedly through the 9th century during the Viking raids on the north Dublin coast. The worst entry comes in 1089, when the church was burned with 180 people sheltering inside, and the place was devastated again in 1135. The square belfry, the round tower, and the heritage centre stand on ground that has been a religious site, and a frequently burned one, for over 1,500 years.
Barnewall and Bermingham, in stone
The tombs in the belfry
Inside the medieval belfry are several carved tombs from the families who held land around Lusk in the late medieval centuries. The James Bermingham tomb dates from 1527; the monument to Christopher Barnewall and Marion Sherle dates from 1589. These are the kind of effigy tombs - recumbent figures, carved inscriptions, weathered heraldry - that you would normally have to pay into a cathedral to see, sitting instead in a parish belfry in a north Dublin commuter village. The belfry and its tombs are part of the heritage centre housed in the adjoining 1847 church.
What the name means
Lusca - the cave
Lusk comes from the Irish Lusca, meaning a cave or underground chamber, and the name pre-dates the Christian foundation. Some accounts take it literally and point to a cave in the area; others read it as the hollow of land the settlement sits in. Either way the village kept the name through fifteen centuries of monastery, belfry, and now estates, without ever settling the question.