For today’s walk, I want to visit the original site of Adamstown. Now, I’m not necessarily talking about the new town that has grown up to the south of Lucan over the last couple of decades, but, rather, the lands a little further to the south, between the railway line and the canal, where Adamstown Castle itself once stood.
To do this, my walk will take me from Esker Church to what is now Lucretia Tiles and Kilsaren Concrete. But for the uninitiated or those new to the area, a little bit of background to the names of some of the places: Esker Church marks the beginning of what used to be known as Cruck Hill. This road, which leads from the village to the south was, historically, called both the Lock Road and the Adamstown Road. Basically, Adamstown Castle was built in the 1500s, whereas the “Lock”, referring to the 12th lock on the grand Canal, wasn’t built until the 1770s. The road, which used to go to one place, Adamstown, now went to two places. And so, it gained two names. To complicate matters, when I was growing up in Lucan in the 1980s, we called it the Newcastle Road. This, again, makes sense as the road terminates in Newcastle. I have absolutely nothing to base this on other than a hunch, but perhaps Newcastle only became a place on the radar of Lucananians after the introduction of the car in the 20th century. There was no need to refer to it as the Newcastle Road before that because, if you were from Lucan, you most likely were going either to Adamstown or to the canal.
The rain clears just before I commence my ramble, meaning that I am instantly overdressed. No matter. The sunshine is unexpected but not unwelcome. I pass the ever-busy Supervalu shopping centre and begin to make my way south, past the horses visible in the grounds of Finnstown Castle.
In the past, when I have written about castles, I like to find some of the stories associated with it. If there’s an unusual family story or a ghost story, all the better. But today will be different. The Castle, built about 500 years ago by Thomas Adams, fell into ruin after it was abandoned sometime around 1880-1890. I have seen a picture from 1907 of what was left of it that shows it surrounded by cows and, as many of you probably know, cows are notoriously poor record keepers. It was demolished around 1960 and the site has, since then, been used as an industrial site. Any ruins that might remain lie beneath the carpark attached to the factories. The census records show that there were only a handful of people living here in the early 20th century. With so few people left, and with the castle falling into ruin, it seems that any stories associated with the castle have also disappeared. In short, other than a couple of references here or there, there are no stories left behind from the heyday of the castle. I am visiting a place without stories.
As I bypass the new Adamstown developments, it strikes me that a lot of it isn’t built on the Adamstown townlands. The northern parts are built on the Finnstown townland. This is the last inhabited place that I pass before I reach historical Adamstown. I stop just shy of the railway bridge and look over the other side of the tracks to where the castle would have stood. Ironically, the silos of Kilsaren concrete stand up in the landscape like towers and turrets. Perhaps it isn’t that difficult to imagine what it would have looked like in its prime after all.
On the other side of the bridge, the road bends to the right before straightening and continuing down towards the canal. When this road was built, sometime after 1760, it appears to have swerved here deliberately to accommodate the castle. The entrance to Kilsaren marks the location of where some of the castle buildings stood. I contemplate rambling in, but in my first two minutes here, four cement trucks barrel in and out of the narrow, hedge-lined road. I decide not to brave it. I myself might make it, but my skittish pet greyhound wearing her green greyhound t-shirt may prove too much of a distraction for the unsuspecting drivers. I decide that this is as far as I will go.
I cross the road at this point and move back towards the bridge. I look across the railroad tracks and note where the Hanstead estate begins. Here, along the tracks, was where Lucan South train station once stood until it closed in 1947.
In 2005, when the link road was being built alongside the railway lines at this site, an archaeological excavation found something quite remarkable. Buried on an east/west axis, the skeletons of 43 adults and one infant were found here. I do not know if they have been dated yet, but there was one quite expected find. As the excavation report states:
“A single find uncovered with a burial was a fragment of plastic rosary beads found in the pelvic region of Skeleton 10. This find may not suggest a modern date for the burials, as they were disturbed and truncated by the railway wall, which appears to date to the 1950s. It is possible that the rosary beads were interred when the burial was disturbed during the demolition of Lucan station…”
It is likely that a construction worker discovered them in the 1950s, reburying them with an apology of rosary beads.
I will end my ramble at this point today. It seems fitting to do so. I came to visit Adamstown Castle, a place for which no stories seem to have survived. In doing so, I end up at a place where we know that people lived and died. Who they were, we don’t know and, just like the nearby castle, they appear to have taken their stories with them.