Tag Archives: River Liffey

Dublin Highlights

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I was born and grew up in Dublin. I spend a lot of time travelling through Dublin and its environs. I live nearby, in the town of Bray just 20km down the coast. I have regularly posted on my Dublin adventures. Of late, I have noted some good posts from overseas travellers and locals alike (World in Your Eyes and Finding Your Feet). So I thought I might join in and post a few Dublin memories. Something of a greatest hits perhaps, or top ten tips type of thing.

5 Top Sights

The Liffey

Christchurch Cathedral

St Stephen’s Green

Phoenix Park

Grand Canal Docks

Dublin is a great city to walk round. Literally. My series Dublin’s Circular Roads describes a particular route. Another circle is provided by the two canals, the Royal to the North and the Grand on the south. Within their radius the city centre is divided into north and south sides by the River Liffey. It is the river that makes the city. Each bank is lined with quaysides from the estuary in Dublin Bay upriver to the western rail terminus, Heuston Station. The main buildngs to see are the Custom House and the Four Courts, both by Gandon and on the North Quays. The Ha’penny Bridge, a cast iron pedestran bridge spanning the river between Liffey St and Temple Bar is one of Dublin’s most iconic sights.

Christchurch is the more ancient of Dublin’s two cathedral’s. King Sitric Silkenbeard, overtaken with piety in his later years, established it in 1028. The Synod House to the west is joined to the Cathedral by an arched brdge, making it look like the main road passes through the ancient church. Wonderful.

Dublin can be heaven

With coffee at eleven

And a stroll in Stephen’s Green

(Dublin Saunter by Leo Maguire and sung by Noel Pucell)

St Stephen’s Green waits at the top of Grafton Street. In the seventeenth century it was a commonage on the outskirts of the city. It was walled in 1664 with access restricted to owners of adjacent properties until 1877 when Sir A E Guinness, Lord Ardilaun, put the park into public ownership. Entering through Fusiliers’ Arch, pathways flow around the ornamental lake. Young Dubliners and visitors lounge on the grass, taking time out from the big smoke. Meanwhile, on the western end of the city (just past Heuston) the Phoenix Park is a vast walled park housing the Zoo, the President and a herd of deer. 

The Grand Canal inscribes a sublime arc around Dublin’s south inner cty. It reaches the estuary at Grand Canal Docks where the modern highrise of Google Docks clashes appropriately with nineteenth century docklands. This area provides a fitting finale for my Dublin’s Circular Roads series.

5 Top Visits

Dublin Castle

Trinity College

National Gallery

Hugh Lane Gallery

Guinness Hopstore

Dublin Castle stands on the spot where Dublin began. In the ninth century Viking raiders landed at the confluence of the Liffey with its tributary the Poddle. On the shore of this dark pool they established the Danish settlement, taking its name from the Gaelic for the pool: Dubh Linn. The Norman invasion three centuries later led to the building of Dublin Castle by order of King John in 1202. For eight hundred years it was the centre of foreign power. After Independence the Castle was used for state occasions and became a major tourist attraction. There’s a garden on the site of the old Dubh Linn, near the Chester Beatty Library which holds a priceless treasure of Oriental manuscripts, art and artifacts.

Trinity College campus is an oasis in the swirling centre of the city. Founded in the reign of Elzabeth at the end of the 16th Century it has become one of the most prestigous colleges in the Enlish speaking world. It houses the Book of Kells and its Library by right holds every book published in Ireland and Britain. 

The National Gallery is one of a quartet of public buildings flanking Leinster House, Ireland’s Dail (Parliament). The National Museum and Library face Kildare St, while the Gallery and the Natural History Museum (or Dead Zoo) face Merrion Square. The Gallery came from the Great Exhibition of 1847 on Leinster Lawns, proposed by Railway developer, William Dargan. The collection features the best of Irish art including Lavery, Yeats, Burton, Orpen, and international greats including Vermeer, Turner, Caravaggio and Monet. An extensive portrait gallery features contemporary and period art. 

The Hugh Lane Gallery on Parnell Square was founded as Dublin’s Metropolitan Gallery. It is named for Hugh Lane, a young collector who amassed a fine collection of Impressionst art. He died on the Lustania in 1915, not quite forty.

Arthur Guinness established his brewery in 1759. The clocks of Dublin have been stuck at a minute to six ever since. In our heads, at least. The St. James’s Gate Brewery lies in the Liberties to the southwest of the city. A visit to the Hopstore will give you the full story, followed by a creamy pint in the elevated splendour of the tenth story Gravity Bar.

Or, you could go to one of Dublin’s many pubs.

5 Top Pubs

Dublin is packed with great pubs. There is no definitive syle, they come in all shapes and sizes. The Victorian and late Edwardian are perhaps most typical. Many’s the blog and pubication that has given the top ten or twenty. It all depends. For what it’s worth, my favourite five are:

1. O’Donoghue’s of Merrion Row, 2. Toner’s of Baggot Street, 3. The Palace in Fleet Street, 4. Grogan’s Castle Inn on Sth William St, 5. The Stag’s Head at Dame Court.

That’s maybe enough for one pub crawl, but there are many more. James Joyce’s Ulysses posed the riddle of the impossibility of crossing Dublin without passing a pub. It is easily solved, of course. Don’t pass any, just go in. If indeed you do pass the Stag’s Head, and you shouldn’t, it’s near enough the definitive old style Dublin pub. 

With all that drink, the only people to remain upstanding in Dubln are its statues. Dublin’s statues immortalise figures from fact and fiction

5 Top Statues

1. Molly Malone on Suffolk Street, 2. Phiil Lynott on Harry Street, 3. Oscar Wlde at Merrion Square, 4. James Joyce, 5. Patrick Kavanagh.

The statue of Molly Malone by Jeanne Rynhart dates from Dublin’s millennium celebrations in 1988. Molly steps from the air of a song to become flesh, or bronze at least.

In Dublin’s Fair City

Where the girls are so pretty

I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone.

As she wheeled her wheelbarrow

Through streets broad and narrow

Crying cockles and mussels, 

Alive, alive-oh!

The song is of obscure provenance. A music-hall ballad of the 1880s it was attributed to Scottish songsmith, James Yorkston. It has become the anthem for the capital city. She can certainly wheel her wheelbarrow. First time I saw it ‘twas at the bottom of Grafton Street, now it stands outside Saint Andrew’s Church on Suffolk Street.

Molly was a seventeenth century barrowgirl who earned a bit on the side plying the oldest profession. The song certainly alludes to sex. Cockles and mussels has salacious connotations. Young lovers and visitors to the Fair City have taken the photo opportunity the statue offers. It is traditional to fondle one or both of Molly’s breasts, giving them a sunburst emphasis.

At Bruxelles Pub near the top of Grafton Street, another lifesize statue vies with Molly for popularity. Phil Lynott was black and Irish as Guinness and leader of Thin Lizzy, kings of the Dublin Rock scene. They took a rocked up version of Irish trad balled, Whiskey in the Jar, to the British charts. The ballad records the misadventures of a seventeenth century highwayman whose lover in Lynott’s version is called Molly. So no accident that they’re still close. 

But me I like sleeping

Especially in my Molly’s chamber

But here I am in prison

Here I am with a ball and chain.

(Whiskey in the Jar)

Lynott died in 1985, aged just thirty six. The video for his solo hit, Old Town, features him swanning about Grafton Street, Ringsend and the Long Hall pub on George’s Street.

Oscar Wilde reclines sedately at the northwestern corner of Merrion Square. James Joyce saunters down North Earl Street across from the GPO. Another writer, poet Patrick Kavanagh, reclines on a bench on the Grand Canal at Baggot Street Bridge.

On Pembroke Road look out for my ghost

Dishevelled with shoes untied

Playing through the railings with little children

Whose children have long since died

On the Road – 2 – The M50

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The M50 near Sandyford (acrylic on canvas)

The M50 loops around Dublin city’s western perimeter. Technically, it starts at the River Liffey, heading north as the Port Tunnel before doubling back along the western arc near the Airport, crossing the Liffey at Chapelizod and finally merging with the southern bound N11 at the Dargle River, near Bray. This is EuroRoute 1, heading to Wexford and thence the Continent, bound for Gibraltar.

The construction of the motorway began thirty years ago. The first section, the Western Parkway joined Blanchardstown and Tallaght, crossing the Liffey at the West-Link bridge. The West-Link floats above the Strawberry Beds, a stretch of deep river valley between Chapelizod and Lucan. The area is famed in song and story.

Where the Strawberry Beds sweep down to the Liffey,

You’ll kiss away the worries from my brow.

This well known refrain is from the song The Ferryman, written by Pete St. John. It has been covered by the Dubliners and the Dublin City Ramblers. The Strawberry Beds itself sustains the folk and ballad tradition with pubs such as The Anglers’ Rest, The Wren’s Nest and Strawberry Hall.

Strawb 2

Angler’s Rest

The area was a popular spot for Dublin daytrippers and courting couples. A century or more ago it was sufficiently remote and romantic to be a popular honeymoon destination. James Joyce is associated with it, of course. From Chapppelizod he liked to contemplate the Liffey. Finnegans Wake focusses on the rivers gathering flow hereabouts, its principal characters living in the Mullingar House. Plain structure that it is, it has been a long-time sentinel above the river, founded as a coach house back in 1694.

Chapelizod 1

The Mullingar House

Sheridan Le Fanu lived here, merging the parkland and built environment with the gothic of his ghostly tails. The House by the Churchyard where he lived, his father was a vicar, still remains. It provides the title and central focus of one of his most celebrated novels. 

By the eighteenth century there were suggestions of suburbia here on the fringe of Dublin. Heading westward along the Liffey’s banks, they are still only suggestions.The area is a rare slice of unspoilt rural scenery close to Dublin. The Phoenix Park is to the North. Beyond the south bank the twentieth century suburban sprawl of Ballyfermot and Palmerstown is hidden in the folds and forests of topography.

W-link

The West Link bridge

There are a number of boatclubs along the way, taking advantage of the ninterrupted stretch of river. The area is not much commercialised, emphasising the impression that time has passed it by. The contemporary world does provide an exclamation mark with the intrusion of the West-Link bridge. Soaring above the quiet valley, far enough above to be of little disturbance, no more than a distant aircraft. Originally a slim, single span on completion in 1990, such was the volume of traffic that a second span was added in 2003.

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The weir at Lucan

Beyond the bridge, the valley snakes towards Lucan. This far west, we’re nearly in Kildare. Though Lucan may be regarded as a Dublin suburb, it is sufficiently old and remote to be viewed as a town in its own right. Some old industrial sites emerge from the parkland before the river vista expands at the bridge. A huge weir provides the spectacle upriver, and there is a small park giving better access to the river. Much of the town’s structure dates to the early nineteenth century. It was once a spa town and despite the heavy human and vehicular traffic, the population is around thirty thousand, it retains a certain olde world charm replete with village green and thatched pub.

Looping back to the M50, the Dublin Mountains edge closer. The Red Cow junction was once called the Mad Cow such was the traffic chaos. Brian Boru, High King and attempted nemesis of the Danes parked nearby in his eleventh century campaigns agains Leinster and Dublin. The arc of the M50 still provides a notional border between the realms of Dublin and Ancient Hibernia. Of course, urban sprawl crosses the divide. Lucan, Clondalkin and Tallaght all lie to the west.

The Southern Cross section reached Dundrum in 2002, while the final South Eastern section linked up with Bray three years later. The whole shebang was upgraded to six lanes in 2010, as it was in danger of becoming a linear carpark. You’ll still encounter jams at morning and evening rush hour but for the most part journey times have been slashed and the route is visually attractive, especially towards the south.

M50 Bray

the M11 near Bray

Crossing the Dargle River it merges with the M11 and enters County Wicklow. The Dargle is referred to in another well-known balled, The Waxies‘ Dargle. This alludes to Bray’s position as a resort for the well-to-do in Victorian days. The railway from the 1850s provided access for the quality to Bray’s renowned sea and riverside amenities. Meanwhile, the Waxies‘ Dargle was the poorman’s equivalent. The waxies were cobblers, and these and other tradesmen could hardly aspire to such exotic locale as Bray. A jaunting car or charabanc to Irishtown, where a fairgreen faced the bay, was as much as they could hope for.

Says my aul wan to your aul wan,

will you come to the wakies dargle.

Says your aul wan to my aul wan,

sure I haven’t got a farthing.

These days, the M50 will take you around the western periphery by private car. You can trace the eastern edge of the city, along Dublin Bay by DART. You can stop for refreshments, for ceol and craic, wherever you desire.