The passing of Bernard Wailes

It is with personal sadness that your editor records the death of Professor Bernard Wailes, Friday, March 30, in London. He had been diagnosed with emphysema and had been in hospital recently.

The news was relayed by Dr Susan Johnston from George Washington University, a longtime friend and colleague of Professor Wailes who was Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Curator Emeritus of the European Section of the Penn Museum.

Bernard Wailes was responsible for the excavations in the 1960s and 1970s which established the credentials of Dun Ailinne as one of the most important of the ancient tribal sites in Ireland.

Professor Wailes's work unearthed a complex sequence of constructions and ‘finds’ demonstrating Neolithic/Early Bronze Age, Iron Age and Medieval occupation.

Dr Johnston restarted investigations at Dun Ailinne in 2006, using non invasive methods, and these have corroborated and extended the knowledge gained during the original excavations.



In July 2008, on the weekend of the official opening of the Dun Ailinne Interpretive Park, Professor Wailes was guest of honour, and was presented with a specially-compiled booklet of visual memories from the original and current works on the site, and the new Interpretive Park, by Kieran Forde, chairman of Kilcullen Community Action.

Your editor remembers him fondly during the several summers of excavations, as he was a good friend of my father and there were some very enjoyable occasions involving him and his crew of local helpers in The Hideout.

He will be missed by his family, who were with him when he died; by all those Kilcullen people who knew him in the excavation years, and especially by Dr Johnston, who knew him since she was a child and later became his collaborator in the publication of the final report on the findings, Dún Ailinne: Excavations at an Irish Royal Site, 1968-1975.

A lovely man, may he rest in peace.